Another busy and weary Sunday.
I’m never sure if working with people makes me more positively or negatively disposed towards humanity. I certainly see both the best and the worst, even in a library.
Why do people give in so easily to despair? Is it simply a desire for poetry, and for us, is poetry so bleak? Happiness is not a place, nor a job, nor your daily habits nor your monitary worth nor your religion nor your popularity nor your “strangeness” or “ordinariness”. Happiness is nothing but a choice to be happy, in any condition. We trick ourselves into thinking that forces play upon our joy, suppress it or deny it. But we’re all just swinging in our own cages.
I think that maybe, in a world like today, being happy almost makes us feel foolish. As if we know there’s a black cloud hanging over our heads, a hole larger than Europe in the ozone layer, a crazy dictator in power, starvation and disease running rampant the world round, nuclear destruction seems impossible to avoid at some juncture, melting icecaps … WHAT RIGHT HAVE WE TO BE HAPPY!?!
Sisyphus didn’t think on these things. He rolled a boulder up a mountain. When it reached the top, it rolled down the other side … his work to begin again. Must we imagine him happy, too? I’ve felt his happiness, and my failure is that I can’t explain it. If asked, I’ll say “Read Camus”… and that too’s a failure. Read “The Little Prince” and read “The Alchemist” and read Russian literature and French literature and American literature …. they’ve all felt like Sisyphus at times.
And to the illiterate — I guess that to them, I have nothing to say.