Siding with Thoreau

I blame L.M. Montgomery.

It was in Anne's House of Dreams that Anne met Mrs. Leslie Moore:

"Dick Moore came into her life that summer. His father, Abner Moore, kept store at the Glen, but Dick had a sea-going streak in him from his mother; he used to sail in summer and clerk in his father's store in winter. He was a big, handsome fellow, with a little ugly soul. He was always wanting something till he got it, and then he stopped wanting it--just like a man. Oh, he didn't growl at the weather when it was fine, and he was mostly real pleasant and agreeable when everything went right. But he drank a good deal, and there were some nasty stories told of him and a girl down at the fishing village. He wasn't fit for Leslie to wipe her feet on, that's the long and short of it. And he was a Methodist! But he was clean mad about her--because of her good looks in the first place, and because she wouldn't have anything to say to him in the second. He vowed he'd have her--and he got her!"

"Nobody knows the rights of it. All the folks who kept the boarding house could tell was that about a year before they had found him lying on their doorstep one morning in an awful condition--his head battered to a jelly almost. They supposed he'd got hurt in some drunken row, and likely that's the truth of it. They took him in, never thinking he could live. But he did--and he was just like a child when he got well. He hadn't memory or intellect or reason. They tried to find out who he was but they never could. He couldn't even tell them his name--he could only say a few simple words. He had a letter on him beginning `Dear Dick' and signed `Leslie,' but there was no address on it and the envelope was gone. They let him stay on--he learned to do a few odd jobs about the place--and there Captain Jim found him. He brought him home-- I've always said it was a bad day's work, though I s'pose there was nothing else he could do. He thought maybe when Dick got home and saw his old surroundings and familiar faces his memory would wake up. But it hadn't any effect. There he's been at the house up the brook ever since. He's just like a child, no more nor less. Takes fractious spells occasionally, but mostly he's just vacant and good humored and harmless. He's apt to run away if he isn't watched. That's the burden Leslie has had to carry for eleven years--and all alone. Old Abner Moore died soon after Dick was brought home and it was found he was almost bankrupt. When things were settled up there was nothing for Leslie and Dick but the old West farm. Leslie rented it to John Ward, and the rent is all she has to live on. Sometimes in summer she takes a boarder to help out. But most visitors prefer the other side of the harbor where the hotels and summer cottages are. Leslie's house is too far from the bathing shore. She's taken care of Dick and she's never been away from him for eleven years--she's tied to that imbecile for life. And after all the dreams and hopes she once had! You can imagine what it has been like for her, Anne, dearie--with her beauty and spirit and pride and cleverness. It's just been a living death."

Leslie Moore is the heroine of the story because she unflinchingly and without complaint takes on an obligation to a man who has abused her, and sacrifices every dream and happiness to do so. She Suffers Nobly. But it seems to me that most of the Victorian heroes and heroines Suffered Nobly. They all had obligations that tied them to a living death where even the briefest moments of happiness were only fantasies. They were admirable because they laid themselves prostrate on the rock and invited the vultures to eat their livers, and never even needed to be chained there.

Well, you say, thank goodness for progress; no one would do that nowadays. Dick Moore would be put into a facility, Leslie would get a divorce, and she'd find happiness with someone else. But would she? No, we don't consider ourselves chained into miseries brought about by unhappy relationships--unless in some cases those relationships are with immediate family members--but how many people do you know who consider themselves chained into some other form of misery, who live Thoreau's "lives of quiet desperation," who consider it their sign of strength and maturity that they simply endure an intolerable situation?

Can't we blame the Victorians? I do.

Today it mostly seems to be about money. Or jobs, which come to the same things. Researchers tell us that our levels of happiness have not increased since the 1950s, yet we convince ourselves that the 3x-larger houses and all the stuff that goes with them are requirements--and force ourselves to endure jobs we hate to pay for all of it. Our own eyes tell us that children growing up without all of the advantages are no less happy than the ones esconced in fully-stocked playrooms in the 4,000 square foot McMansions (off-topic: I will never forget seeing, while house-hunting a few years ago, a miniature roller-coastter in the basement of one of the houses we looked at), yet we feel like thieves, robbing our own babies, if we don't do everything in our power to buy them whatever the world has to offer. In so doing we offer them role models of dissatisfaction and materialism, and actively support social and economic institutions that reduce the security and viability of the world they will one day inherit. A moment's conversation with someone who has health problems or is disabled will reveal that this, too, is not a requirement for happiness, and they are as likely to be joyful or depressed as anyone else.

So what is a requirement for happiness? No one knows--that's the problem--but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the first one is a belief that we don't owe the world our misery. That there is no Noble Suffering. There's Nobility, and there's Suffering; but they are not conjoined twins. I am beginning to think that what we owe the world is our determination to act as if happiness matters--everyone's happiness, not just the well-fed westerners--and learn how to scale our values to those goals. I mean, there's a reason that millions of people wake up every morning to drag themselves to a job they loathe in order to pay for things they never wanted and which don't make them happy. Somewhere along the line, they were convinced that this was the right thing to do, or that it would make them happy, or both.

My parents, for instance, are both overjoyed at having recently been let go from their jobs (which nice severance packages on both sides)--and what does that tell you? They have a really nice home that is in a constant state of renovation and it is full of really nice stuff that they paid a lot of money for (earned in the jobs they were both so happy to be fired from). I don't think I can say that I ever saw either of them truly happy. Or even falsely happy. In fact, I can still remember conversations with my father, bemoaning that he didn't try harder to achieve his own dreams before settling down to the middle-class professional family life. I don't know if it ever stopped rankling. Were they doing it for us? But it didn't work. They were so unhappy, and it carried through into their parenting in large and destructive ways. Not the least of which was the powerful argument that adults were people who Suffered Nobly by staying in careers they hated to pay for stuff that doesn't make anybody happy.

Which I then applied by staying in a marriage that made me desperately unhappy, in the delusional belief that doing so would make Erik happy--or Frances happy. This was patently not the case. Erik was not happy. Frances was happy, but Frances is the happiest child who ever lived, and smiles while throwing up. You can't take that as evidence of anything. If I'd decided several years ago that I didn't owe anyone my Noble Suffering, would anything have been different?

Truthfully I am, right now, genuinely happy. I have no reason to be, I know. My job situation is not appreciably better than most of my peers, I don't believe--it pays well for someone who has a degree in my field, but that's not saying much; it's not terribly demanding; I get a fair chunk of time off and the health insurance is good, which is important. Gods know it's not my health, as my blood sugars continue to run bizarrely high and I continue to chase after them with frustration boluses. It certainly isn't because I have my personal life running like a well-oiled machine.

And it's not because of platitudes, either; I haven't been infected by the Positive Thinking crowd with their obsessions on mantras and all the rest of it, as if each of us can manufacture our mood and state of mind by putting blinkers on and not seeing the problems. I see the problems. Clearly. But the job that's not perfect pays for my insulin pump supplies and facilitates a life outside of work that has friends and activities I value highly. The blood sugars will resolve themselves eventually if I keep plugging away at it. Over a few decades of insomnia I've learned that no matter what it feels like at 3:30 am, I will sleep again. And the divorce, as difficult and painful and stressful as it continues to be, also continues to be the solution, not the problem.

I've cried enough. I've wallowed, moped and dwelled enough. I'm not giving those memories one more tear; I'm not sacrificing one more minute of my life towards something that can't be changed and will soon be over anyway. I am happy because I am determined to be happy, goddammit.*

But mostly, I think it's because I realized that while my misery may have increased Canada's GDP and my consumption of various sugary snacks, it did not make the world a better place, and it did not increase the happiness of one single other person or animal the world over. The opposite. To sacrifice my own happiness and not achieve one valuable thing as a result is surely the height of foolishness. So I'd make a lousy Victorian heroine. Who needs it?

I'm not going to the grave with the song still in me.

I'm just not. I refuse.

~~~~~

* You all understand that I am applying this only to me, right? This is not a direction nor an attempted solution for anyone but myself. I also would like to emphasize that this is obviously relevant only to situations actively chosen, or--at least in my own case--after an adjustment period where they have not been actively chosen. I was not so sanguine about diabetes in the early years.

Posted by Andrea at May 16, 2007 10:44 AM under Me

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