The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [136]
Again, I include this long quote because the details are so revealing: the “sea air,” the overburdened nerves, the idea that “strong men” look upon such suffering with contempt, the noun nervine, the idea of bringing the body to a restful place and passively waiting for happiness.
Asbury Park, too, was very much about community: they had baby parades, pageants “designed for the Puritan more than the Bacchanalian or Bohemian,” and they held a “Children’s Carnival.” At Ocean Grove, fancy clothes were frowned upon, while at Asbury Park everyone dressed up and strode the boardwalk to see and be seen. Writing for the New York Tribune, the novelist Stephen Crane noted that people flocked to the boardwalk at Asbury Park “to see the people…. For there is joy to the heart in a crowd. One is in life and of life then. Nothing escapes; the world is going on and one is there to perceive it.”12 It is revealing of our own concerns that we fetishize solitude such that our fantasy is an empty beach. More people live in cities today than in the past, so we are crowded in that sense, and maybe that’s why we want to be alone; but due to the housing shortage in those rapidly industrializing cities, today we have more room. We do head to the throng for fun, too, but our preoccupation with beach solitude may be historically unique. Asbury Park was a playful, social, vital place that felt “at the heart” of things: one can there see “the world” going on. Bradley was praised for having built a “city dedicated to health and happiness.”13
The differences between the two towns were at first minuscule; they were called twins. Both were family friendly and proper, but the difference was that one changed its mores to follow the middle class, whereas the other determined to keep faithful to the middle-class preferences from the time period of its origins. This is a thorny decision that determines the story of all special projects: keep it going as is, until it dies, or let it change entirely, and live. After a while, the business and hotel owners of Asbury Park wrested control from Bradley and introduced liquor licenses and Sunday amusements. Without the pressure of a population dedicated to sobriety and an idle Sabbath, capitalism and desire were free to make alterations to the original idea of the town. From then on, the twin cities started insulting one another in local newspapers, with the Park imputed as a pack of sinners and the Grove as a bunch of prudes “who look upon anything that conduces to cheerfulness as a crime.”14 It is almost comical how wholesome Asbury Park was—a children’s carnival!—but Ocean Grove had grown more notably about the pleasures of self-denial and the experience of being part of a community with special virtues. Notice how these models—happiness by purity and self-denial on the one hand, happiness by fun and self-indulgence on the other—created each other. More than the profane outside world, it was gently progressive Asbury Park that pushed Ocean Grove to fall in love with its conservatism. Montaigne wrote, “The laws take their authority from possession and usage; it is dangerous to trace them back to their birth. They swell and are ennobled as they roll, like our rivers: follow them uphill to their source, it is just a little trickle of water.”15 So that is my twin study. It argues that culture counts a lot, and that cultural mores are really arbitrary. Clearly, every “conservative” culture had its clock stopped