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By Root 1171 0

it is not real enough for that. Present-day convictions about what normal people do are much too certain. What people eat, what they wear, how they relax, how they party, whether they have sex and how they feel about it, the drugs they take or refuse—it is all tremendously dependent on time and place, and it is not all the same. It is a lottery. If you live in an era that has encouraged you to consider only half of the items on each of your happiness lists, it is up to you to make an effort and do some experiments on yourself. I emphatically do not mean that you can go off on your own morally. I’m talking about things many of us just don’t do enough of. Try a parade, a spa, a roller coaster. Talk to neighbors. Do something in the community and for the community. Go to a show. Go to a crowded beach and go to an empty one. Inspire a young person. Go swim in water that assaults you and go practice your back float in a still lake. Go to a local celebration like a saint’s feast or a parking-lot carnival. Ask yourself how these feel, and take some notes on the answer. While you are there, and a week later, ask yourself if you are glad you chose to try this, what was the most negative thing about doing it, and how often you would like to do it in the course of a week or a year or a decade.

Cosmopolitan eras like ours are lucky. We have the opportunity to be one of the more savvy periods in history, to pull back from our convictions, hold still, and take in the great variety of outlooks. When someone says that “they” have now got something figured out, you may say aloud or in your head, “No, they probably don’t.” People are shouting too many philosophies of health and happiness at us, and we do not need to sort through the cacophony, but only to notice the character of concerns. We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not. We seem fanatical for longevity—which I do not dismiss entirely, of course, but which seems painfully at odds with people’s actual behavior. We try to promote sobriety, but again our actions do not accord with our words, and that will not square until we start respecting the positive aspects of drugs. We are obsessed with productive decorum, and require it everywhere but in art, today’s haven of topsy-turvy and costume. We are still acting out our victory over the primary battles of life: after ten thousand years of farming grain, fabricating clothes, and outsmarting wolves, we don’t have to do any of that anymore. These serve now as our great symbols of authenticity. We need to awaken from not noticing them, from taking them as given. As we have seen, there are other ways to see things.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for conversations I have had with Jeffrey Ringle and Amy Allison Hecht. I am also happy to thank Carolyn Eisen Hecht for reading the manuscript and offering immense encouragement. Tanya Elder and Chris Krol helped too. John Chaneski often disagrees with me and frequently changes my mind. Along different lines, I have lately realized that I never mention Michel Foucault in this book, but I cannot imagine writing it had I not read, over a decade ago, his History of Sexuality, Madness and Civilization, and The Order of Things. Thanks to Jim Rutman at Sterling Lord Literistic. I can’t think of anything the Keller-Swansons did to help; indeed, they frequently interrupted me, for which I am grateful. Not least, thanks to the great people at HarperSanFrancisco, especially editorial director Michael Maudlin and my editor, Roger Freet, for much helpful direction, executive managing editor, Terri Leonard, for getting the manuscript to press, and publicist, Julie Mitchell, and assistant editor, Kris Ashley for their help too. Much thanks to designers Joseph Rutt, Joan Olson, and Jim Warner for an especially delicious-looking book. For all that is strange, ridiculous, or wrong in the manuscript, the fault is all my own.

Notes

WISDOM