Enjoying the uplifting painting of a Whirling Dervish, or being a Whirling Dervish in ecstasy.
Music with its vast variety, its sublime rhythms of life: for instance,
There is a flip side to happiness, also: avoiding what is unpleasant, painful, distracting, numbing in life, for our contemporary society is full of woe. We go on vacation to avoid the noise, the pollution ever increasing around us; only avoidance is approaching the impossible. There are people with leaf blowers on the beach now. Planes fly overhead. Disease, violence, danger are everywhere. There is no escape.
My question is whether life is worth living if we give up the illusions and fantasies. What if prayers are no more than calls into the abyss: empty, echoing, hollow words. What if there are no supernatural powers or ghosts we shall meet in a fantastic paradise? What if our lives do not get better, but get worse with aging, illness, loneliness, alienation? Is awareness, consciousness worthwhile if life becomes suffering with no prospect of joy or happiness from what we do?
There is no ready answer. Religious texts offer no meaningful salvation. As a t-shirt that belonged to my husband, which I wear now, claims, "You only live once." No afterlife. No reincarnation.
Nonetheless, as Keats wrote two hundred hears ago, "A thing of Beauty is a joy forever."
He also wrote in Endymion, answering the question, "Wherein lies happiness,"
"To the chief intensity: the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship, and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.
All its more ponderous and bulky worth
Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth
A steady splendour; but at the tip-top,
There hangs by unseen film, an orbed drop
Of light, and that is love."
The Joy of Friendship:
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