The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [21]
From the ancient world on, some philosophers have charged that trying to limit desires helps only so much, and anyway, it is no way to have a good time. Koheleth wrote: “Go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, and drink thy wine with a merry heart…. Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity…for that is thy portion in this life, and in thy labour which thou takest under the sun. Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest” (Eccles. 9:7–10).
Montaigne wrote that when he finds a voluptuous pleasure that “tickles” him, he does not let his senses steal the experience for themselves alone. Instead, he says, “I bring my soul into it…to enjoy herself; not to lose herself but to find herself. And I set her, for her part to admire herself in this prosperous estate, to weigh and appreciate and amplify the happiness of it.”9 Not only does Montaigne take his pleasures, he stands up for them, which is certainly much harder.
As for me, then, I love life, and cultivate it…. I do not go about wishing that it should lack the need to eat and drink, and it would seem to me no less excusable a failing to wish that need to be doubled;…nor that we should beget children insensibly with our fingers or our heels, but, rather, with due respect, that we could also beget them voluptuously with our fingers and heels; nor that the body should be without desire and without titillation.10
This is one of the funniest claims that life is for living. It is so convincing because he not only refuses to limit his joy in pleasure, he also brings his finer mind to the experience. Even more, he invents some pleasures just to show that if these existed, he would do them, too. Still, we need to know that we are in charge of our desires, and this takes practice and attention.
In our opulent (if often obscene) modern world, it seems severe to say no to it all. Yet one of the most important things we have to learn is how to cope with abundance and with our hunger for yet more abundance. Alcoholism is a complicated predicament, but it may be said that if you can have one drink, and stop, you can have another tomorrow, but that if you can’t stop after one, you might have to stop entirely, for good. You have to be able to say no in any given now. We have so much food, and yet we want to be thinner than we have ever dreamed in history. A decade ago the headlines were about anorexia, now they are about obesity; both are all about control. The anorexic often is a girl with no power over anything in her life except what she eats, who cleverly manages to control the whole family by this tiny gesture of not eating. Obesity, too, is about control, of course. Sometimes it is the response of someone with more power than he wants; he makes himself submissive to his hungers. Sometimes it is a pantomime of rebellion; the dieter sighs Screw it as she tucks into her ice cream.
Being able to say Not now prevents having to learn to say None for me, ever. Today we have amazingly developed doctrines and techniques for learning to say no. The big lessons are these: A decision to change one’s life has to take place in the present, because soon never comes. The present seems so small and meaningless that it seems too inconsequential to fret over. Confronted with a library of books, in this moment, you couldn’t make a dent. Even if you read all afternoon,