Vol. 5, No. 5, May 2008
RSS Feeds
BOOK REVIEW: Against Happiness
Eric G. Wilson • Sarah Crichton Books
Here’s a refreshing change of pace: a book that says it’s okay, it’s good, it’s necessary to feel lousy from time to time. It could even be important, not simply for individuals but for societies and the world.
Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest and a National Humanities Center fellow, is appalled by the obsession among modern Americans with vapid, inch-deep “happiness.” We emphasize happiness not simply as a goal but as a right, he says; in doing so we discount the mournfulness and restless yearning that in the past have created our greatest art and inspired our greatest thinkers.
To prove his case, Wilson presents a roll call of history’s famous melancholics: President Abraham Lincoln, who agonized over each decision that led to the Emancipation Proclamation; philosopher Carl Jung, whose black depressions were followed by vivid revelations about the nature of God; Georg Fredric Handel, who wrote “The Messiah” at one of the most desperate times of his life; Emily Dickinson, for whom sadness was a muse; even Bruce Springsteen, whose Nebraska album was written during a time of deep personal doubt.
Wilson observes that contemporary culture seems offended by even the hint of unhappiness or imperfection. Every rough edge must be Botoxed out. Every frown must be turned upside down. Every blemish and bad time must be airbrushed away, and each person’s “self-esteem” protected from the buffetings of life. Every relationship must be Stepford-smooth, until genuine emotion becomes impermissible.
It’s a challenging proposition, but in Wilson’s words, to be against happiness—to walk up to one’s anguish and uncertainty and know it as the inevitable cost of being alive—“is to be close to joy, to embrace ecstasy.”
