Monday, November 26, 2007
Via Andrew Sullivan, I came across this blog post, the first in a series, about Virginia Woolf, which tries to answer the question, "How can we learn about ‘the good life' from a woman who killed herself?" It touches on two things that I've come to believe strongly. One of which I've discussed before-- the hardly-ever-acknowledged value of being a loner. Loners are, at best, considered eccentric, and are more often thought to be mentally ill and potentially dangerous. It's almost a given that it's more desirable by a longshot to be sociable than to be someone who enjoys being by themselves. Despite this bias, some of the greatest contributions to science, art, and politics have been made by loners. And while an argument can be made that it is better for people to be sociable than to be loners, it's not obvious, to me at least, why that should be the case. The second thing that the blog post discusses is that a "good life" is not synonymous with a happy life: [T]o be a fully realized, accomplished human being never means "just being happy." Being fully human means feeling an often-painful empathy and working for a community we have not yet built. I once heard, I think in a movie that I can't remember, a statement that basically describes my view on happiness that I'll paraphrase thusly: "Happiness comes in small doses. It's a cookie before dinner, a cool breeze on a hot day, a kiss from a pretty girl. Happiness isn't a constant state; life is for the most part lacking happiness." I don't think that's depressing because I don't think I need to be happy to be fulfilled. In fact, I would say the 'good life', that is the life you would most like to live were you able to choose, is the life where ,more often than not, one chooses the difficult, perilous path rather than the easy, happy path. The things that are worth the most over the long term like character and self-confidence and wisdom are not forged during happy times, but rather during times of difficulty and uncertainty.