• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1236 0

marriage is), so they don’t; and since they don’t, we don’t need all the food. But, of course, you need the cake; even a fifth marriage will usually get a tiered cake. Happiness needs cake. For the principals, there are rituals and costumes. For everyone, there is access to a special kind of dancing. One part of it is circle dancing. Think of Matisse’s Dance, which pictures five men and women holding hands and dancing in a circle; the joy is transporting.1 As the novelist Milan Kundera wrote, “Circle dancing is magic. It speaks to us through the millennia from the depths of human memory.”2 As a happiness lesson, nothing could be more straightforward: if you get a chance to dance in a circle, get up out of your chair and do it. Walk over and put out your hands, and people will unlatch themselves to take you in. You cannot just think about it and get the benefits, as you cannot just think about whiskey and get drunk. I don’t want to hold two random people’s hands either, but the simple advice of the ages is that when you get a chance to dance in a circle with people, get in on it.

Also important is joining in when people start acting out the letters “YMCA.” I am joking a little here, but the more impossibly stupid it feels to you, the more I insist that you try it. It is great for you if everyone is doing the same motions simultaneously, but the fast disco wiggle interchanged with the slow couple shuffle is as much a cultural creation as any other ritual dancing. This dance act seems like a default remainder of skills that were truly practiced in the past, but that view may be exaggerated by our perspective. A space alien pointing her telescope into the party window would see a group of people rise from their chairs, gather in the room’s center, and become an unpredictable but controlled machine of movement, rarely colliding. If our alien studied it, she’d see that the dance was governed by rules: who gets touched, where and how much, what facial expressions are appropriate, and, for instance, what kind of dance moves could get everyone else to stop dancing and watch. Our alien need not be from outer space. An untrained Frenchman or a Brit dropped into an American wedding often does not know how to negotiate it and stands about watching. It is worth noticing that as ordinary as they are to us, our celebrations are complex affairs for which we have a lot of privileged information. It is good for us to notice that there is a dance to be danced and that we know how to do it. Also, it is good for you to be in a crowd where most everyone has taken the same drug; to do this legally in the United States, the open bar at a wedding is your best bet.

For a demonstration of all these marvels, see the opening scenes of The Wedding Crashers (2005), in which two extremely charming and appealing youngish men (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) use wedding season as a chance to meet women, sleep with them, and never call. The movie’s tour of American weddings is brilliant fun, because instead of seducing only individual women, the guys seduce the whole party, and the women shake loose like apples. The way they seduce the whole party is by eagerly participating in all the rituals and thereby making the rituals seem youngish, charming, and appealing, which gives other people the permission (or even the idea) to gleefully embrace the round of rituals themselves. The plot of the film, unfortunately, is a tale of how romantic love stops the guys from doing the very thing the film had to offer. The plot should have been that romantic love, once attained, allows them to realize that what made the weddings fun for them wasn’t only the aroused women. Coupled up, they could continue their spree. If you went to a friend’s loft party, with a hundred strangers, you would not leave your purse on your chair and go dance. Yet at a wedding where you know only a handful of people, you very well might. It has nothing to do with knowing the people. It is that the culture of the wedding includes a letting down of one’s guard, such that stealing would be experienced