mills

Ovid, Metamorphoses, III, quoted by Montaigne. To my knowledge, this is the only Ovid quoted by Tom Waits.

One should always wait till a man’s last day, and never call him happy before his death and funeral.

Montaigne expands on this assertion by citing historical reversals of fortune: instances in which someone’s happy life is upended by tragedy and disaster and their final years are spent imprisoned, enslaved, impoverished.

There is something peculiar in this, though, for one might ask why the first sixty happy years of a man’s life wouldn’t handily outweigh the last miserable ten. This falls into the category of existential mathematics: in considering the past, present, and future, or the phases of a life, where do we assign the weight of our calculations?

What matters: the happiness of childhood or the anguish of adolescence? Are we happy now or only in some summation of biography? If happiness is of the moment, can a reckoning be cumulative?

The plain fact: I could not say if I have been happy in this sense; I don’t know; I feel as though I’ve been happy, but part of happiness is that one’s creaking memorial apparatus shuts off and one abandons oneself to the joy of the moment; one remembers pain better, and for good reason. Sometimes I think I’ve never been happy.

In another, darker sense this argument now seems odd: in the developed world, those of us who do not die by accident or violence will die in a manner as gradual and unhappy as can be imagined. If one leads a life of success and contentment, if such a thing is possible, but spends the last decade of it forgetting oneself, losing one’s memories to gray mist, losing one’s loved one’s to the void and nullity of dementia, losing one’s physical autonomy, losing everything one wanted to be, can we say one was happy?

Would Ovid or Montaigne feel that our prolonged deaths negate the happiness of our lives? Whom would they call happy at his funeral?

-Will, asked to introduce himself at a large photography club meeting last night. Others said things like, “I’m Andrew and I’m an accountant, and I like to take bird shots.” Since Will isn’t a photographer, he decided to summarize his Bohemian Zen Buddhist Motorcycle philosophy.

Awed, reflective silence followed.

My friend the Error Gorilla posted Neurotics, by Philip Larkin, after quoting it in some correspondence. I liked it enormously, although I now think that there is something to be added to it: if “none think how stalemate” grinds the neurotic away, it is only a temporary failure; I now feel that there is very little that isn’t experienced universally, by all, and that as such we might say that to be despondent is to believe that none think of us when, indeed, all do, in a kind, but limited or perhaps helpless way.

It is so hard to help one another, anyway; as Larkin says: the wounded mind admits only accusations and horrors, only bent pennies. Those who care for us, should they be luckily and momentarily well, might pour understanding on us, might be silent to give us space, might stand back because they don’t know how to help, but it is not that they cannot see the grinding: it is that we cannot believe they do, cannot feel their awareness of us.

Aldous Huxley in Along the Road, quoted by the always-brilliant Greg Brown, who adds the following (which I’ve quoted in its entirety, bolding a particularly good sentence):

“Jorge Luis Borges expanded this idea in “Funes, His Memory” (also sometimes translated as “Funes, the Memorious”). It’s a quick read; here’s a quote*:

Funes, we must not forget, was virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas. Not only was it difficult for him to see that the generic symbol “dog” took in all the dissimilar individuals of all shapes and sizes, it irritated him that the “dog” of three-fourteen in the afternoon, seen in profile, should be indicated by the same noun as the dog of three-fifteen, seen frontally. His own face in the mirror, his own hands, surprised him every time he saw them. Swift wrote that the emperor of Lilliput could perceive the movement of the minute hand of a clock; Funes could continually perceive the quiet advances of corruption, of tooth decay, of weariness. He saw - he noticed - the progress of death, of humidity. He was the solitary, lucid spectator of a multiform, momentaneous, and almost unbearably precise world.

It’s a useful reminder that just as memory has its power, so does forgetting.

* The wording’s actually a bit different than in the link since I’m using a different translation from Andrew Hurley, as found in my copy of Borges’ Collected Fictions.”