The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [93]
Even for our grandparents a “house,” a “well,” a familiar tower, their very clothes, their coat: were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost everything a vessel in which they found the human and added to the store of the human. Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life…. Live things, things lived and conscient of us, are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last still to have known such things.8
Accept one more critique of the modern materialist culture. Of the postwar suburbs, singer-songwriter Malvina Reynolds wrote in 1961:
Little boxes on the hill side, little boxes made of ticky tacky.
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes all the same.
There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one,
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky, and they all look just the same.
And the people in the houses all went to the university
Where they were put in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there’s doctors and there’s lawyers, and business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky and they all look just the same.
And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry
And they all have pretty children and the children go to school
And the children go to summer camp and then to the university
Where they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same.
It doesn’t sound bad at all, actually. There’s university, and camp, and dry martinis! And everybody gets a house! What makes it so creepy is the potential for isolation and how being in planned rows of houses together, but not enmeshed in a real social community, leads to secretiveness, outward conformity, and soul-sapping competition. The point I want to make is that these critiques are all true, but they are not the whole story. Rilke knows his fascination with transcience might have come in any age, and Reynolds might have agreed that a safe, quiet home is a good place to think and write songs.
There are ways that people get together nowadays. Locally and regularly at book clubs, for instance. Some sweat together. From football and softball to Gabrielle Roth’s ecstatic dance and citywide puzzle hunts. Lots of people have national groups they belong to, which meet once a year or so. Historians get together at the annual American Historical Association Convention and some of the same ones may meet up again at the History of Science Convention. The National Puzzlers’ League has an annual convention, and members might also meet up at Will Shortz’s yearly crossword puzzle tournament. Once a year is hard to do, but consider what is gained in a life where one does such things some of the time. Local or distant, all are hard to maintain. We are very busy with our nuclear families, our careers, and our hunger for entertaining information. Which is fine, but you need some of this midlevel social stuff. Shopping is favored in part because it is malleable: you can do it for any amount of time, whenever and almost wherever you are. And it isn’t completely unsocial.
Shopping is a chance to clothe and create oneself, and also a chance to talk to strangers, to demonstrate one’s control over the immediate environment, and to bring home an object of beauty, utility, or interest. It is an opportunity to be with family and friends. It is an opportunity to be in a crowd or in exclusive solitude. We get to show the cashier that we have money and that we are big enough to use it. We get to show our loyalty to certain communities of style.
Above the poverty line, money is not the answer to happiness. Yet even in the world of the sufficient, people are