Oedipus Rex

Oedipus Rex makes it incredibly difficult for happiness to make an appearance. I mean, really, it's tough to find happiness in a story that deals with murder, incest, guilt, and gouging out eyes... and I'm an optimist. Since we are dealing with an ancient Greek legend, we can typically assume that it will be a story of either tragedy or comedy. The Greeks weren't known for evoking multiple emotions throughout a story, unlike Steinbeck. I suppose if I was going to pull happiness out of the tale, it could possibly be the happiness that Tiresias possesses in knowing Oedipus' fate and watching him blindly stumble into it anyway. But this is assuming Tiresias revels in Oedipus' unfortunate and predetermined journey and is otherwise happy when he can say "I told you so" at the end of the play.

Before giving up on the rest of the happiness in the land of Oedipus, I think a different angle is necessary to explore happiness. This story, spun countless different ways over its thousands of years, has been told to thousands of individuals for entertainment. It was originally played out, never written down, in order to entertain the Greeks amidst their daily lives. Even if it's a tragedy with little to no happiness or joy involved, it was still serving as an escape from reality and fun for those listening. I'm guessing that the thousands of individuals who have heard/read/told this story since then have found some sort of happiness in form of entertainment. Even if that does mean that we like hearing about gouged out eyes..

East of Eden

My summer book, East of Eden, is so unbelievably complex and intricate that it's sometimes difficult to pull out individual strands of happiness from the pages. There are so many characters pulling the reader in so many ways that it's tough to understand their actions, let alone their emotions. But I think that's what John Steinbeck was striving to do. I think if he was thinking about inserting happiness into his novel, he wanted to do so that it blurred the lines of happiness and sorrow, joy and anger, and his ultimate debate of good and evil. The point is that is the characters experience happiness in so many variations as they live out their lives in the Salinas Valley.

Take Samuel Hamilton, a character I perceive to be extremely good and moral. His greatest joy and his happiness comes from his children, his wife, and his podunk farm that rarely supplies enough food for his family of 11. Happiness exists on the Hamilton farm when one daughter is married, or a son starts his own business, or when there is a good harvest. Sam chooses to see happiness and optimism in his harsh valley of life.

But then, there's Kate. Kate; a character so cynical and so evil that I truly don't believe she could exist in our reality. Everything about her is wicked and ill-intended. But ironically enough, I think that she almost finds happiness more than any other character. To Kate, happiness is manipulation and deception and murder. Through her evil actions, she ultimately ends up pleasing herself, whether she acknowledges it or not. Her happiness is twisted and immoral in most of our eyes, but who are we to judge someone else's happiness?

Between Samuel and Kate, there are multiple characters who greet happiness along with the ebb and flow of their life. Adam, the father of Cal and Aron, finds happiness in, unfortunately, Kate. Lee, Adam's housekeeper, finds it in his studies of the translations of the Bible, and by giving Adam and his family advice. Liz, Sam's wife, finds it in ordering others around and maintaining a household of such order that it would put any accountant to shame.

The point is that happiness, as I mentioned in my first post, is impossible to place one definition on. Every being experiences it in different ways at different moments in their lives. In East of Eden, the tangled web of lives led throughout the multi-generation story provides examples of just that. Life is in fact all those things, evil, good, anger, joy, sorrow, and happiness. I think it's all of them, going on at the same time.

The Big Question

What is Happiness?

It's a topic so thought about, so ingrained in who we are, that it was written into our constitution that we must pursue it along with life and liberty. So, what is it? Well according to Wikipedia, happiness is, "a state of mind or feeling characterized by contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy". But then that inevitably leads to more questioning as to what is love, or satisfaction, or pleasure, etc. It's simple and to the point, yet it has perplexed many generations before us as to what is its proper answer truly is. And after all these years of philosophizing, pondering, wondering,and searching, what do we have to show for it? It is indeed written in the most important document in our country and we do like to casually throw the word around pretty frequently in our daily lives.

But before this blog in its entirety is dedicated to pursue happiness in life and literature, I feel obligated to express my feelings on the matter. I think that I'm setting out to do something impossible. Because I don't think happiness is anything. I think that it has 6.7 billion different definitions and explanations, for every single person on this planet has a different idea of happiness. And among the 6.7 billion people, we find happiness to be defined differently at any given moment of our lives. For what is happiness when we're 6 is different than what happiness is when we're 6.5, or 16, or 66. It depends on who we are and what we value in life in that given moment. It is as simple as sitting on a dock at sunset, or it can be flying on a private jet to a secluded island. It is tangible and intangible, spoken and silent, and we can acknowledge its presence or we can be blissfully unaware that it has touched us.

How many definitions of happiness does that add up to? Well, what is 6.7 billion times any one moment that any one being has ever lived? I don't know; I've never been good at math. But we can explore it and hope that it leads to better our understandings of ourselves and of life around us. I love this question because it doesn't have an answer. It can't have an answer. It won't ever have an answer. And really, isn't that the best kind?