One Inborn Error

"There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy... So long as we persist in this inborn error... the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in things great and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining happy existence... hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called disappointment."

Arthur Schopenhauer, German philosopher

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Dear Kate,

Life, a disappointment?  How can it be?

It's not even noon time yet and I am already filled.  My heart is stretched and thinned and in a very tender state of being now.

Johnny Cash sang to me on my walk to work: "At Folsom Prison," one of my favorite albums.  Half way through the songs and I knew I was ready for a novel from the South and exactly where I will be heading next time at the library.

Before that I want to read again about the grandpa in Marilynne Robinson's "Gilead" and that's exactly what I did first thing after arriving at the office.  I have a copy of the novel at home and another at work, both placed beside my Bible.

It was a busy morning at work but joy didn't fail to break through.  Somehow the smell of a beach where I've never been filled me through the nostrils and I thought how I love what cinema used to be, that in her you can literally smell a different world and live another life through that.  I thought about Sylvia Chang, my favorite Chinese actress, how she looks and moves in Edward Yang's movie with the beach where I've never been, and my heart ached with a pain I've never known.

Schopenhauer was a bitter man, so I think.  I picked today's quote and agree with what he said here.  To him there are only two ways out of mankind's existential crisis: be a monk (he called a "sage") or spend as much time as one can with art and philosophy.  By "art" he meant aphorism and tragedies and political theories, no "sentimental" stuffs.  Schopenhauer died with only his poodle by his side, in his apartment.  He named his dog after the Buddhist "world soul" but the neighboring children simply called it "Mrs Schopenhauer."

No, I don't think we can pursue and secure happiness.  Once we pinned her down she is but a dead butterfly, good only for a page in the history book, probably as a sad example of some lost ideal.  The more "likes" we get on Facebook the worse we will fall into sustained and escalating disappointments.

Yet this doesn't mean it's not possible to be happy.  In fact, joy always, always surprises us at the most unlikely of times and places and circumstances.  Which is another way to say the one true God is notoriously impervious to being summoned by any sort of our invocation.

I took a screenshot of the movie I mentioned above, as you can see.  The English subtitle translation is wrong.  What the voice-over says is: "I can still remember...it was a morning filled with hope..."

Yours, Alex

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Dear Alex,

Disneyland, the Happiest Place on Earth, is magic most merrily missed by most kids and adults. They simply cannot access its happiness by foot or footage when no footnote can frankly capture their footprints on the global fringes of survival. By local standards, the happiest place has failed to deliver happiness to over 80% of its workers whose hourly wages dip lower than $12, a number weighted in real implications for real lives incapable of covering monthly expenses. Happiness in Mickey Mouse and Princess Ariel looks and feels absurd.

The landslide from happiness to disappointment becomes more slippery as we ponder on the death toll of Sri Lanka's recent terrorist attacks that has climbed to more than 350, a strange sum in evolution from day to day remotely circumstantial to most of us here in another hemisphere disconnected by oceans of personal and professional priorities. Your unhappiness is yours, not mine. I may have more tongue to talk up to towering theories, more mind to mime a morsel of empathy to mimic solidarity with earthlings in the unhappiest places on earth. Do understand that my hands and feet can merely cover limited bandwidths when outstretched to maximum capacity. Let me park my SUV, my family, my life at a cheerier, safer Disney lot on the right side of this contradictory, raging cosmos. I shall persist to avoid disappointments.

Last night after supper, my teen daughter and I talked for about an hour. Our conversation was nothing schematically eloquent in scale - not about world hunger or diplomacy, not even about neighborhood delinquency or local injustice. We narrowed our dialogue to a sliver of intimacy - just her and me relationally in ordinary words exchanged across synaptic gaps in perspectives and silence. It was a messy interaction with emotional displacement and hopes misplaced. In the end I had a puzzled countenance of more questions than solutions, more holes than healing, disappointments, not happiness, escalating exponentially. Yet there was something palpably happy about my feeling of unhappiness. I was just happy about her presence; any unhappy consequences seemed to matter less. Last night was time gifted for her and me, not an exploration of notions or ideals standardized to target universal happiness among rainbows.

Our countenances of disappointment mirror our interior existence which may never approximate the American dream or gilded castles and carriages crafted cleverly in the Happiest Place on Earth. In my unhappiest of disappointments, I am happy to know that I have been wretchedly wrong, base and blind, a failing parent and homemaker, a mound of dirt to be re-sculpted by my Maker without error, loitering somewhere between Disneyland and Sri Lanka in the spectrum of (un)happiness on my pilgrimage expressively and innately damned for the most exalted disappointment in human history but salvaged wholly for heaven-on-earth existence in wholeness.

Yours, Kate