by TERRY CAESAR

Terry Caesar teaches British literature in the San Antonio College, and creative writing at Gemini Ink, in San Antonio, Texas. He also writes for the e-magazine Inside Higher Education. He has published books about the American higher education system, travel writing, and literature.

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VERSÃO EM PORTUGUÊS:

Sobre teses, cachorros, e felicidade

On Dissertations, Dogs, and Happiness

I used to carry around with me a statement by Paul Goodman: “Happiness is the feeling of necessity.” The words are not self-explanatory. But immediately they seemed so to me: you’re happy if you’re doing something – anything – that feels necessary; the necessity will act to absorb uncertainties or equivocations.

Did I especially like Goodman’s statement because I was usually all uncertainty and equivocation? Perhaps. The necessity governing my life at that time was writing my dissertation. I didn’t want to do it, and this made me unhappy.

So the fact of necessity itself won’t generate the feeling, much less the happiness. What will? A simpler task? I hadn’t yet read Anna Karenina. When I did years later, I thrilled to the scene of Levin’s mowing the field. He becomes flush – not to say shocked – with, in a word, happiness.

The scene still seems to me to be the finest literary representation of happiness. The mowing is, first of all, collective, and, second, physical. Levin loses his usual exacerbated consciousness among the peasants, whose lives consist of nothing if not physical exertion.

So happiness is the – or an – act of necessity? Not so fast. Goodman’s statement introduces a crucial moment of felt consciousness into the act. Without it, virtually any act could constitute happiness. With it, only some acts become happy.

The more focused these acts, the better, and the more they partake of those in some way authorized by other people, the more necessary. It’s difficult to induce happiness, and it’s probably impossible to induce it all by yourself. Levin doesn’t mow in order to be happy; instead, he discovers that the mowing makes him happy.

But does what he feels really merit the name of “happiness”? There’s a recent little volume, Happiness, by a British scientist, David Nettle. It seems serious research on happiness has transpired for some time. The field is best called “hedonics.” There is even a journal, Journal of Happiness Studies. Nettle approves.

Early on in the book we read of interest within Positive Psychology concerning “the state known as flow.” It sounds to me a bit like Goodman: “total absorption in a challenging activity for which the individual has the skills.” But even when the skills are stretched to their limits? But this is too strenuous as well as too exceptional to describe Levin in the field.

Nettles does make a useful distinction among three “levels” of happiness: momentary experiences, judgments about feelings, and conclusions about quality of life. So what Levin experiences mowing is a “level one” happiness. Anything can bring about level one. Presumably mowing would not rise to level two if it had to be done every day.

And if Levin were a peasant he would be, well, happy to throw his scythe away in order to go in search of a better level three line of work. In fact, in a distinct sense, although Happiness does not exactly say this, level three happiness can strive to do away with particular manifestations - or acts - entirely.

Witness me with my dissertation. I accepted the necessity. On any specific day, though, I just didn’t want to commit the act of writing. Levin, on the other hand, is simply happy to mow. He might or might not be pleased to consider the contribution of mowing a field to the quality of his whole life. But this question would not make him happy, and, indeed, the mowing is only such an occasion for happiness because it relieves him of the duty to ask “questions” of life.

Hedonics is of course driven by questions--the more susceptible to empirical study, the better. So Happiness is full of all manner of conclusions according to the latest research about the relation of marriage to happiness (good) or to neuroticism (bad). The contributions (considerable) to happiness made by an individual’s personality or health are assessed. The role of serotonin (important) is discussed.

But you could read the whole book and the reason why Levin experienced such happiness mowing would remain elusive and mysterious. Or, dare I say, the reason why I experienced such unhappiness while in grad school in the writing of my dissertation, which I left off, once I began to teach full-time.

A decade later, the dissertation wasn’t even necessary to complete. I already had tenure. I had been promoted. Only a series of circumstances prompted me to resume research on a dissertation again, now with an entirely new subject. This time I loved the research. Gradually, the ensuing months grew into something suspiciously resembling happiness.

Now I recall them as some of the happiest of my whole life. But this is a level three judgment. I ignore, say, the sheer physical pain of eventual writing, in a chill upstairs room, trying to keep my feet positioned against a tiny space heater, while wind seeped in through rotted window panes.

Or was the happiness I felt then something even more mysterious? Did I come to impart a feeling of necessity even to that pain, as if it guaranteed that a project nothing if not speculative and cerebral could actually be made flesh? Neither necessity, after all, nor the feeling that drives it has to be pleasurable in order for happiness to be the result.

Again, Levin’s mowing becomes a vivid example. It’s hard work. He sweats. His muscles ache. He earns his happiness, and we realize, as perhaps he does not, that the only true happiness he would be capable of feeling – capable of feeling as such – would be the happiness he had earned. 

Thus, even level one manifestations of happiness become suffused with level two dimensions as well as finally charged with level three ideas. At any rate, this is the sort of happiness I feel most thrilled by, and it can be found in anything, from writing to mowing, if there’s enough felt necessity there.

Now I write about the beginning of my professional life while at the end of it. My career hasn’t been an especially happy one. Or to put it another way, what has given me more happiness has been learning how to write about my career, beginning with institutional politics. The writing has come to feel more necessary than the teaching ever did.

Perhaps the process began with a dissertation I never had to write (and originally couldn’t write because I had to). What eventually made me happy in doing so was not any one isolatable moment in time, from finding out I could still receive the degree to turning in the final copy of the manuscript to the graduate school office.

What made me happy is what has continued to make me happy ever since: the sheer rigor of writing itself – sensing the spark of a new idea or watching (a process almost passive) for the moment when the arc of an argument seems thoroughly completed. The feeling when the circumstances of your daily life seem variously inside a piece of writing: that’s happiness to me.

Just so, though, this last feeling can only be inquired about from outside. Is it accurate to say you only write about happiness if you’re not happy? (If on the other hand you were happy, why bother to write?) The best moment in Nettle’s book is when he cites the “hedonic paradox”: “The notion that by pursuing happiness itself, one makes it more distant, whereas by pursuing something else, one can inadvertently bring it closer.”

Does it not follow, therefore, that the best discussion of happiness would actually be about something else? Certainly when Levin began mowing he never imagined it would make him happy. On the other hand, when I began writing my dissertation perhaps I could only imagine it would make me unhappy.

Happiness; or how to live by continually bringing something else into your orbit, in order to discover its felt necessity? This sounds more, though, like a definition of life, rather than merely of happiness. You live, and you discover, as we say, that certain things “make” you happy, as if the agency is in them, not you.

During the past couple years, I’ve become increasingly interested in animals. This puzzles me if I think about it (which I try to avoid doing). Animals have always been compelling to me. But I’ve never made charitable contributions before, and now I have two dogs. The past year, I’ve even given two papers about animals at professional conferences and written a column about dogs in the classroom for a professional journal.

Could it be that animals, and in particular dogs, simply make me happy? But why? Awhile ago, I suddenly remembered  the following passage from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”:

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and

Self-contain’d, I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,  

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of

owning things,

No one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of

years ago,

No one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.

This last line especially seems to me very telling, although the first line is what first prompted me to remember the passage in the first place. Animals, that is, are happy. Or at least necessity governs their lives utterly. Alas, it has never governed mine, not even when it ostensibly did, and therefore I should have written my dissertation.

Especially for those of us who are not especially disposed to happiness, it’s important to have examples of happiness around. These examples – including literary representations – may not be able to teach us how to be happy. But they can inspire us that happiness can be found. I might have written my dissertation if I’d had a dog. Or just gone outside more and mowed the back yard.