Doubled Happiness

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

—G. K. Chesterton

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Dear Kate,

Is it ever possible for us to find meaning outside of being together with our fellow human beings?

I believe not.  I can't imagine how.  Maybe you can.  If you can please let me know.

I suppose one can point to stories like the Tom Hanks movie "Cast Away" or its predecessor "Robinson Crusoe" as good examples of a person going on a lone search, but don't forget Wilson the Volleyball, or that the stories were told to an audience, you and me, someone standing at the other side of the fifth wall, speaking to us about the tension between society and individual, appealing to what we already know to be true: that life's meaning is readily articulated when a person is together with someone else, someone he welcomes, someone she resists, anyone, and it is in the absence of such togetherness one must deliberate the essence of and give an explanation to one's life.

Say if this last Christmas has been normal, I would have been to a few parties and dinner gatherings already.  I wouldn't have to justify why these coming-togethers are life enriching: they are simply assumed to be the case or else why would I even keep doing them?  The festivities might leave me high and dry (if past experience is anything to go by), but that's another matter, related but not refuting the premise.  The point is as long as I keep doing them, keep being together with someone else, I am living out reasons to keep on living, no questions asked.  I'll just need to keep going after what is assumed to be desirable by my fellow human beings, my desire conditioned by our collective ambition.

Now what if somewhere, somehow a certain line was crossed, that in our togetherness we are no longer aspiring to what is even practical, practicable, but in unison still feeling compelled to sing about our willful blindness as a way to salvage what is left of our togetherness?

Gratitude is not built into our grand narrative, our story together.  We are thankful when we are in need and something good is done for us, but that something being done will soon be proven to be not nearly enough to satisfy our ambitions.  You might even say we are thankful because our causes are being advanced, because someone has done the right thing to make sure they are not held back.  We are thankful for what is usable to us, workable for us.

Have you ever been thankful for your ambition being held back, your desire frustrated, your competitive edge dulled?  In a world where a person understands oneself chiefly as a consumer competing after limited resources, laying claim to anything claimable (which is, like, everything, now even the outer space), there are winners and losers.  Losers are never thankful, that's for sure.  Neither are winners, because they have only themselves to thank.  (Your Consumer/Competitor in Chief has been both.  Was thankfulness ever in his narrative?)   Our collective thanklessness has to do obviously with our cosmic distrust: No one has our best interest in mind, and even if they do, they are not able to deliver, now and finally.

This Christmas I gave myself 7 collections of poetry, more than 5,000 pages altogether.  I believe we are most together when we are individually receptive to being taken apart.  If you are to gesture with your hands the opening-up and closing-in suggested in my last sentence, your arms will flap like the wings of angel.

Yours, Alex