Dearest Bleaders,
Well,
it’s Wednesday February 3, 2010 and there’s a few things I want to tell you about. But first,
a little about an older post:
The
Boston Globe is going to print, this Sunday, a slightly adapted version of the “On
Suicide” post I wrote to you bleaders a few weeks ago. I’m moved, proud, and a
little shaken by the response this piece has received. As you bleaders know, I
am generally billed as a poet, historian, philosopher and minor-famous atheist.
Because of my books, especially Doubt: A History, I get invited to give talks
and in these talks I have found myself developing what I lately
call Poetic Atheism. I have recently realized that the Wednesday blog posts
I’ve been sending you for the last year and a half constitute quite a whirlwind
tour of what I believe about what life is for and how to figure out what we
really think – and how to proceed. I went over to the list of blogs on this
blog and scrolled to J and clicked and there unfurled a year and a half of
carefully mined casual comments on the state of the estate, the condition my
condition was in (the condition in which was my condition). What I like best about it, reading in either direction, is
that the questions that are central to each of my books are all here, always
deeply steeping in each other.
Writing for this site I have a sense of the
people who might be reading me here that allows me a degree of honesty and
comfort shooting from the hip. That is to say that if I had just sat down to
write something interesting every Weds. and just kept them in a file, I don’t
think I would have created anything like what I’ve ended up with after a year
and a half of writing to you guys. So thanks. Thanks also to the commenters who gave me such a solid return of emotion on the suicide piece (Jan 11, 2010), it really
meant the world to me after having opened myself up like that. Thanks also
to those who got mad at the piece, though at first it also stung, it gave me
information I needed to make a few adjustments. So yeah, thanks.
As for new business: Tonight
at the Yeshiva University Museum (at the Center for Jewish History 15 West 16th
Street, NYC) I’ll be taking part in a very intriguing evening. I’ve been
mentioning to you that this was coming up: some artists were asked to make some
art responding to Genesis, and as stated in the press release: “Before they
began to work on their pieces, the artists and curators met with Jewish
scholars to study the text of Genesis, and to learn about
the Jewish tradition of text and commentary. In effect, the artists were
invited to create
new commentaries for the 21st century.”
Then we writers were brought
in to each comment on one of the pieces of art. We had a few months and
then we all sent in our writing so that they could be ordered for this
evening’s reading and we have been told that the collection is fascinating
together especially as book-ended by my poem in the front and a piece by
novelist Dara Horn in the back. Fun right? I’m looking forward to
finding out what that means. I’m also just plain looking forward to
reading this poem I wrote for them, which will be rousing, I think.
Then
tomorrow morning I get on a plane to Tulum, Mexico to again discuss modern
research on happiness with a bunch of other scholars; kind of a think tank
idea, we are being paid to come together, no audience, and try to find a way to
collaborate across disciplines. We’ve all written books about happiness
which have discussed the modern research. My book uses modern research
where a study provides a new way of demonstrating philosophical ideas that are
themselves ancient, or at least old. I just don’t think most of the
studies are truly scientific. There is too much room for interpretation –
in the questions, in the answers, and in the analysis of the answers as a
whole. If you read a study that showed that people like you (women if you are
one, or go with ethnicity) are happier when other people make decisions for
them, you would just dismiss the study as wrong. If scientists in a lab tell me
women have a lower threshold for radiation poisoning or something, if I doubt it I
can ask for a repeat trial, but then I’m going to have to accept it, even if I
hate it. But your gut tells you how weak the science is with asking
happiness questions, and it’s very weak.
Nonetheless, how can we turn our backs
on such a crucial question? If it could be shown to be reliably
demonstrated that people with three children report themselves to be less happy
than people with two children, we would want to know. So far we have very
little that can be parsed this way. Mostly we have poetic evidence that is much
deeper than scientific evidence. Happiness is complicated. You can feel happy
and miserable over the same course of time; everything to do with talking about
happiness is slippery and complex. In my book The Happiness Myth I apply
what I call “happiness through historical perspective” – I try to loosen the
hold of some of our present day assumptions and cultural norms by presenting
some similar ones from the past. It seems weird today that 19th century women
constricted their bodies with whale-bone corsets, but women today want to be able
to see our own bones beneath our clothing. They were more concerned with
shape than size, and we are more concerned with size than shape. It’s a
cultural fad more than a piece of modern truth. In fact, we are generally
blinded by temporal prejudice.
We think that because we know how to build
stuff and go to the moon we are also the last word on the normal way to live.
But most everything that we do today that stands out from history will someday
mark us as our own particular time of weird cultural dances. Gyms are as weird
as hoop skirts were. When it comes to the way we view sex, drugs, money, food,
and much else, an anthropological squint at our own beliefs show us much that
is absurd and wondrous, and sets us free from the tyranny of such beliefs. So
anyway, this was my approach in the Happiness Myth and it makes me a bit of a
weird addition to this think tank, but we’ll see; the goal seems worth trying.
I leave tomorrow and come back Monday and will much miss my little kiddles.
Lastly
there is this: Chins up. Stay alive till next Weds. when I shall
encourage you yet again.
love,
Jennifer