"In a world without sadness the nightingale would burp."
EMCioran
"There are laughs that make you close your eyes." This phrase blunt the poet Luis García Montero attempted to explain the battle that Professor Eric G. Wilson has decided to take against the crown jewel. Everyone wants to embrace. Which employers are bent on selling. The parents want for their children. The politicians include in their speeches: the utopian happiness overrated. "It was the caveman melancholy and withdrawn he stayed back and pondered as his happy hunting and muscular dinner companions, who advanced the culture," says Wilson in his book Against Happiness. In defense of melancholy (Taurus).
"According to a survey recent Pew Research Center, nearly 85% of Americans believe they are very happy or at least happy. " Wilson mentioned the cult of beauty, the obsession with accumulating wealth and happiness pills comfortable and he asks, almost desperately, in the introduction to his essay: "What can we do with this obsession with happiness, an obsession that could lead to sudden extinction of the creative impulse?". citizens can only consider the extent to distance ourselves from that happiness imposed false.
This is not elected to the melancholy of Wilson's speech of Mr. sullen Scrooge, from Dickens, but a rebellious voice against the deliberate imposition of the idea of \u200b\u200bhappiness that American society (and others) has engaged in coining and reaffirmation of melancholy as an engine of creativity. The state of melancholy can be master of your mind, and, above all, settle in uncomfortable territory of individual conscience. Wilson himself admits in his book only when he took seriously his melancholy, " knew my family background and develop a closer relationship."
The debate about the relevance of melancholy as a creative engine is not new. Jorge Luis Borges praised often a monumental book by Robert Burton Anatomy of Melancholy, appeared in 1921, also held at the time Samuel Beckett, Anthony Burgess and John Keats, who also composed the famous Ode to melancholy . Burton said that only immune to the " black bile" fools and the Stoics. Time after the great Gustave Flaubert reformulate the idea with a more incisive phrase " be stupid, selfish and be healthy, here are three conditions needed to be happy. But if you lack the first, you are lost."
In 1932, Aldous Huxley in Brave New World forward a portrait of contemporary society. A society without problems, with the latest technology, mass production, prosperity and peace at the expense of family values, culture and feelings. Something like American society (and other) critical of Wilson and the teacher belongs. Wilson asks "ignorance has to do with happiness, which we created the flat world, without complexities intellectuals?". A question that Ray Bradbury was already in 1953 in Fahrenheit 451, where millions of books were burned because reading the minds confused and was causing concern, therefore prevented people were happy.
No players happy in the literature because the unhappiness generated dramatic conflict. I remember the first lines of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy's "blissful All families are alike, but unhappy ones are each in their own way." With it installed said that the unhappiness is impossible and should enjoy the happy moments, but also embrace the melancholy ecstasy to blow up the creativity.
Wilson closes his essay with a disturbing reflection: "To promote the company absolute happiness is to make a culture of fear." and topped with a warm invitation: " We must find the way, however difficult, to be who we are, sullenness included."
0 comments:
Post a Comment