I am currently reading The Hit, a book written by David Baldacci. It is a thriller about a government agent gone rogue and the mission to bring her down before she can cause too much harm. Anyway, I came across a passage that interested me and ties into what we are talking about in class.
"She [a ranking official in the FBI] had clearly survived much. But the suffering never really left you. It became a part of you, like a second skin that you could never shed no matter how much you wanted to.
It was the shell one showed to the world every day, hardened, nearly puncture proof, yet nothing really could be. That was not how humans were built."
That message is the same as what Aristotle says about happiness, it is a state that, once lost, can never return. Personally, I can say that I have not suffered any major tragedy and so I can not speak from experience whether or not a person loses happiness forever once something bad happens. However, I do have friends who underwent extreme tragedy. Although I can say that these people have gone through the grieving period and learned to at least control the pain, it is impossible to say how it has affected them. Most were optimistic and continue to be so, and I would say that they are happy and that I have not detected any major changes in personality but maybe we, as humans, just learn to hide the sadness.
-Alex McMullen
That's an interesting connection, Alex. It also sounds like a good read. I agree with your statement that happiness is something that can be lost as a result of tragedy. My question about this loss of happiness is: Is there a threshold that decides when we've lost happiness? If so, is this threshold something the individual decides or does some external force define how hard we have to fall to lose this happiness? -Meaghan F.
ReplyDeleteResponding to Meaghan, this is an interesting yet tough question. While you could easily make good points for either side, I would say that this threshold is something an individual decides. Yes, as humans we would all CHOSE to be happy, but I am referring to something more than that. The individual must decide to work at being happy internally. If it was just based off external forces how can we explain why people can still be happy after tragedy? Or why people who have everything can still be depressed?
ReplyDeleteOn a related note, I've taken an interest in the show Fringe, which is a FOX sci-fi thriller. I won't go into too many details here, but one of the earliest events involves the main character, Olivia, and her FBI partner, John, who suffers a great loss. As a result of some "fringe-science" (aka pseudoscience), Olivia sees John all over the place, even though (spoiler alert) he is dead.
ReplyDeleteRight before John died, he told Olivia that he loved her, and this brought her great joy. A few episodes later, Olivia's superior says "you should smile sometime” (or something to that effect), suggesting that Olivia doesn't seem "happy" or content with her life after the death of John, who said he loved her.
Interestingly enough, as mentioned earlier, Olivia sees hallucination-type visions, which show John actively interacting with her (he doesn't rehash older information, but helps Olivia on her cases, and seems to know information that she doesn't know). Of course, no one else except the mad scientist believes she can see these things, but that's a story for another post.
How does this relate to happiness? Well, Olivia didn't really know love before John. All we know at this point is that Olivia was happy with John, was sad when John was injured, and was emotionally distraught when he died. However, she can't shake *him.* It's understandable that she thinks about him a lot, but I think introducing these visions really drives home the point that she was happy at one point, she lost what made her happy, and she keeps having active interactions with her subject of affections and source of happiness.
I was under the impression that the whole point of this was to show that even though happiness can be lost, it is the coping process that is emphasized. I don't know how she deals with this (I'm only on episode 6 of season 1, and there are 5 seasons with over 20 episodes each...), but it wouldn't surprise me if her tormenting apparitions start fading away once she deals with her issues properly. This goes well with what Lucia has mentioned: "The individual must decide to work at being happy internally," and I think that's exactly what Olivia needs to do to stop being pestered with John's apparitions and move on with her life and career.
But hiding the sadness doesn't indicate happiness, it seems. If you have to "hide the sadness," then you are conscious of the fact that something tragic has occurred.
ReplyDeleteIt seems for as much as we want to celebrate human achievements and the wonderful things we are capable of, we also must do justice to suffering, and ultimately I think that means respecting its powerful nature, which I think is also a way of respecting the dignity of human life. That is, to truly respect the dignity of human life is to recognize suffering, when it occurs. The latter doesn't make the annals of history.