Beautiful people are happy

All we have to do in life is to always strive towards beauty. Beautiful people are happy. They are happy because they are lovable. Human happiness is reached when we as humans are highly regarded and appreciated. When we emanate beauty there's nothing that can stay in our way towards happiness.

Ernesto Sabato, The Tunnel

My first book read from the first to the last page in Norwegian. I know that the pulse of a book cannot be felt genuinely if not read in its original language, but I thought if I were to read it in translation, then might as well try the Norwegian one. After having read a review on a literary French blog, declaring the book Sabato's best, I decided I must read it.

Firstly, the plot is simple, maybe too simple if it weren't for all the ideas behind it. Love and loneliness. The problems of our time. The plagues of the contemporary world. If we were to identify the meaning of love by the way we give love, very few of us would belong to the category of those who give unconditionally. The conditionality of love is more than a personal characteristic, it is a social formation. And then there's loneliness. We can read in the papers every day how the number of lonely people is increasing, how a better material situation doesn't come together with a good partner in life. Except that many of us just prefer it this way. For many of us loneliness can be a state of being by pure choice. I suppose in this case one calls it solitude.

Secondly, I resonated with the painter (the protagonist) from the very first page; with his disdain for the critics, for the conventions, for the socializing process, for all the masses with their stupid sets of rules which they follow unconditionally in order to be part of the crowd they are so proud of. He has no consideration for the average and is in a perpetual state of discontent. It was enough to draw my attention.

But nothing comes in relative terms when it's about this kind of characters. The extremes are the rules of life, everything is driven beyond its boundaries, making you a sad and hopeful witness in anticipation of the extremity's effects. There's something both positive and negative about loneliness. It teaches you to be independent and strong when facing the cruelties of life, but at the same time it creates a huge abyss between you and the reality. It actually creates two opposing things at the same time: makes you both stronger and vulnerable at the same time. Not being in touch with things makes you unprotected, takes all control from you. Moreover, it alienates you from the majority, which is part of the despised crowd and which follows the rules you can't stand.

Being part of this world implicitly means belonging to a certain society which carries rules its members must comply with. Refusing to obey these rules makes you vulnerable. And this vulnerability brings suffering along. Love has also its general guidelines accepted by the society, they actually help you set certain boundaries to all impulses and instincts humans might have.

But then again, people who refute the conventionality have some cold blood in them, their living is rather self-centered, they are trying to adjust reality to their needs and wishes. Thus, love becomes a necessity of confirming their powerfulness. And there is one irrefutable thing : unconditionality; which means total dedication to their gigantic existence.

Poverty

There is nothing worse in the world than poverty. It is the supreme form of unhappiness. By nature we can live up to our dignity as humans only when we have freedom. The freedom to think and to act. Nothing's more important for us. It is the first premise we must get in order to prove to ourselves and to the world who we are, where we belong and what we deserve.

One of the things that makes me highly indignant is the ignorance of people when it comes to poverty and the devastating effect it has on people. It affects the power of action, which means the poor are almost never fulfilled as personalities, and the power of mind, which means they have no control over what is the path they want to follow intellectually. Lack of freedom in all spheres of life build up a certain net through which the poor are able to see. There are no clear images in front of them, tomorrow is never a secure day and yesterday is never a happy past.

Nothing's more cruel than the inequality we face in life. And the largest part of this cruelty is represented by poor and suffering women worldwide. These days there's a campaign organized by CARE which has the project of helping the poorest women in the world. It made me think about the enormous difficulties women face worldwide, sometimes the basic needs not being met. These women have never known a different life than the one identified with hardships, needs, shortages, worries, misery. They have never experienced the feeling of those who are given things and whose credit comes from taking advantage of them.

We should never be judged by the place we were born in, it is no decision of ours.

And why not be smart AND happy?

I came across one of Hemingway's quotes a couple of days ago, which says: Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. It got me thinking, it's not as if there's anything new about the statement, I have already been through the stage where I would go about life and pretend to bear the cross of unhappiness as a result of intelligence. This time it made me wonder whether there's a way out of misery for those whose mind never stops working.

First of all, the intelligence is so closely interconnected to unhappiness because the world's a battlefield where the rules of the fight are not dictated by reason, but by instincts. And life is all about fight. Fight for a better place, for a warmer bed, for a softer chair. The principles of fight are quite distinct among people, based on who they are and how they think or how much they think. It's quite a blissful experience when one doesn't spend much time thinking about things, one which I have always longed to have. Therefore, intelligence is all about considering the complexity of things, taking out the mediocre and futile, focusing only on meaningfulness and relevance. But this is such a strain of mind! Smartness means high levels of expectations, hence low chances of satisfaction.

One thing brightness should be in search of is creating happiness out of any situation of life. One must infiltrate satisfaction in everything one does and adjust things and activities to one's tastes and desires so that life becomes more bearable and even enjoyable. But then again, this is a very simplistic way of putting it and it takes a very long way to get to the simple part of everything. But one should try and excel at everything one puts one's mind to. As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow said, In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.

Reading fiction improves our social skills

I remember I had always been good at deciding whether somebody was a good or a bad person from a first encounter. And I mainly exercised this ability in high school and at the university, when I used to give verdicts about teachers to my colleagues: this one's good, oh! that one is a bitch. And it always turned out I had been right. And where was it that I learned so much about people? It was definitely not from a very intense social interaction I was part of on a regular basis. No, my social skills came from a different source, one which used to be considered giving opposite results: reading fiction.

Novelist and psychologist Keith Oatley argues that fiction can help us empathize with other people and connect with something larger than ourselves. It can facilitate our understanding of some other worlds than ours and it makes us better when interacting with others. Now I have got my answer. I have been really puzzled by how I was able to understand others, by the way I managed to get through to people by just asking the questions they were eager to answer and by trying to find out things they liked to talk about and then introduce them into our conversations. I am very fond of my findings in terms of people and their worlds and I rarely like to talk about my own, I'd rather keep it to myself, unless somebody is really interested in hearing about it.

It turns out my fiction reading throughout the years does not have the effect of alienating me from reality, on the contrary, it gets me closer to it, it helps me comprehend things and people through a different way; not by direct contact, but by reading of worlds where people live their lives and aren't aware of somebody studying them; of all the worlds which one cannot possibly manage to come in contact with in real life, but nonetheless available to us and accessible at any time of life.

There's no bigger joy in life than reading a very good book, which depicts a world of people that go through the things you thought could happen only to you. There's no other pleasure than finding out that there have been and will be people just like you, that a direct contact with someone you like is not the only choice given by life.