Life of Johnson: Happiness and laughter

Everything Johnson says about happiness and depression convinces me, almost painfully. I am reading his Life now because I read his Rasselas last year. It is an almost classical form of philosophy, an investigation of happiness through a dialogue, and beautifully lucid.

Pope's Essay on Man is also wonderful, though I scarcely remember anything more than that. Boswell has Johnson commenting on Pope's line,

[Hope springs eternal in the human breast:]
Man never is, but always to be blest.

Boswell writes, "[Johnson] asserted that the present was never a happy state to any human being; but that, as every part of life, of which we are conscious, was at some point of time a period yet to come, in which felicity was expected, there was some happiness produced by hope." Further, that man is happy in the moment, "Never, but when he is drunk." In one of his prefaces, Boswell says he thinks Johnson underestimated man's potential for happiness because of his melancholy. With charming guilelessness, Boswell says he is sure he has had more happiness out of life than Johnson did; Boswell was something of a wencher and a wine-bibber. Johnson must be overstating in any case, or Boswell misunderstanding, because the first assertion means that men are sometimes happy in the present, though that happiness properly belongs to their future self, whose state is the cause of the happiness.

Hope is happiness and despair, not a lack of pleasant feelings, is the opposite of happiness. I wonder what Johnson would think of the idea that there is a second happiness, also not in the present. When long-held hopes are worked towards and then achieved, they leave happy memories, even if at the time there was no real happiness. So people are happy in the memory of rearing children, in remembering that they have acted rightly, in having been to school, in having achieved a career, in short in all kinds of things that while still in progress cause too much strain and work to produce a sensation of happiness.

Recent attempts to develop a scientific understanding of happiness have emphasized that our minds can only dimly imagine the future and more imagine than remember the past. We therefore choose paths unlikely to take us to happiness. There is some science to it, but it is mostly a rhetorical trick. The argument is that remembered happiness, being inaccurate, does not count, or counts for much less; with remembered happiness not counting, it is easy enough to show that gaining some hoped-for state brings much less happiness than expected, and thus that the hope itself was mistaken. But why should remembered happiness not count? It is hardly relevant that my memories are not a bald factual account; they are the only sort of memories available to me. Neither can I implant wholly delusional memories as a shortcut to happiness. If I had the mind of a computer, I would be irrational to have the hopes I do, for they have such difficulties in them that to remember every detail would be intolerable. Having the mind of a man, I have every reason to expect that some of the great satisfactions of mankind will be mine as well. But I think the new science of happiness does successfully describe why pursuing happiness through new toys and entertainments is delusional.

Johnson was not as gloomy as it might seem; even while depressed he was good-natured and enjoyed wit and conversation. Sometimes, when the depression lifted, he would be in a "humour for jocularity and merriment," and would laugh often, "a kind of good humoured growl." Boswell quotes another's description of it: "He laughs like a rhinoceros." A good laugh is such a delight. I have a great-uncle whose sweet-natured, quiet, almost rumbling chuckle, which makes the skin under his chin wobble, is one of the great pleasures of knowing him. Strange but wonderful laughs seem to run on that side of the family; my grandmother, his sister, has a sweet, girlish laugh even in her seventies. Her son, my uncle, had a short, odd laugh that was very endearing, especially with the motion of his prodigious gray eyebrows emphasizing his pleasure. He died a year ago, and even though there was much more about him to miss, how sad it is that while the good he did may be remembered, no one will ever hear his laugh again, and in time it will be forgotten.

I first wrote that this would be divine vandalism, if there were divinity, but that makes little sense and is probably pose. If there are two archons battling across creation, one making, one destroying, then it makes sense to call one a vandal, or maybe it just drowns nonsense in a sea of absurdity. If there is a god as described in Bible, in either Testament, then this sort of thing is merely unintelligible, the actions of a creator who labors over small delights but soon smashes them. Paul says,

Will what is molded say to its molder, "Why have you made me like this?" Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? (Rom. 9:20-21)

The potter may make and smash as he wills. If the Bible did not say it, no one would ever have guessed that so capricious a creator could be said to love what he treats so lightly.