The Good Life, Part 2

Originally posted 26 October 2017

The phrase “The Good Life” has been part of my brain stew for so long I can’t remember when it wasn’t in there.  I assume some professor tossed it in during college, maybe the beef stock of my freshman philosophy ethics class, maybe as a root vegetable in my classical political philosophy class.   Heck, it could have been my father seasoning me with the importance of studying and its future benefits.  I don’t know.

The ambition of enjoying “The Good Life” has been with me so long it seems like part of my genetic or at least tribal inheritance.  It has guided me in my reading and thought forever.  In my twenties, I found Mark Van Doran’s The Liberal Education, Gilbert Highet’s The Immortal Profession, Werner Jaeger Paideia, T.S. Eliot’s Christianity and Culture, C.S. Lewis’ Abolition of Man, Mortimer Adler’s Six Great Ideas.  Toss in some Jacques Barzun, Wayne C. Booth, and Joseph Wood Krutch and you have, to my mind, a centrist, traditional, even bourgeois, set of aspirations. Back in the 1970s, it seemed like a good way to live.  Things got tricky in the eighties and nineties when Reagan and the Moral Majority claimed, then tarnished, all things good and true.  But, as the American mind closes more and more, and as public discourse and ambition coarsens, I have been returning to my simple goal—the good life, a life informed by and perhaps even performed through the great virtues. 

So it is really no accident that last week when I saw Peter J. Gomes’ 2002 book The Good Life that I purchased it immediately.  The fact that I come to the book fifteen years late tells us something of how I have been wandering undirected for some time.

In a previous post, I discussed Part I of the book. Here I will say some things about Part II, “The Good Life: Tools for the Journey.”   I have to admit Gomes surprised me as he delayed a discussion of the virtues that support the good life and explored instead how life as we live it affects how we respond to the virtues.  “. . .as we seek to frame a life and not just a living, a life that is worth living because it is good and therefore good for us, I suggest that we are going to have to learn something about failure and success as two constructive elements of the good life and to come to terms with both discipline and freedom as means to the end of living a good life.”

I was ready for “discipline” and “freedom.”  After all, this retirement blog began with my admitting that, free from full-time work, I needed some better habits. 

But “success” and “failure”? Damn, I wanted highfalutin ideals, not these very real, earth bound experiences.  As someone who is approaching this book and these ideas as a project in retirement, the words “success” and “failure” come at me like accusations.  I have already said, before coming to this book, that I grade my life performance as being B+ work.  I will let others, if anyone even cares, to judge whether I am a hard ass or guilty of grade inflation.  But, I believe, inherent in such a personal evaluation is a hint of failure.  I never achieved undeniable excellence in anything that I have done.  Oh, I have had great moments, like the 270 hitter who drives in the game winning run in a world series game.  But, still, there are all those other “pretty good,” but not great, performances. 

For me, here, the temptation is to devolve into a recounting of my failures. Mostly, I know that I have not failed much.  I failed to get into a graduate program that would have changed my life.  I failed at a business adventure. I failed at my first marriage. I failed at getting published in TriQuarterly and The Georgia Review.  But I have done what Gomes says we must do—pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, move on, and build something new.  Quoting Pema Chodron, Gomes calls all this “the kind of testing that spiritual warriors need in order to awaken their hearts.” Okay, as my fourteen-year old son says each morning the third time I remind him to get out of bed and ready for school, “I’m awake!  I am getting up!”

Gomes also guides me toward a distinction I did not know that I think will help in this journey. As in many places in this book, he turns to the long history of Harvard.  This time to William James and his distinction between the “Once-born” and the “Twice-born” (“healthy-minded” and “sick-minded”).  The “Once-born” are those congenitally happy people who naturally see the glass as half full, optimists.  The “Twice-born” should not to be confused with our current phrase “Born Again,” but there is some partial overlap, if the “born-again” are not rebirthed as thoughtless optimists, but as thoughtful, regretful sinners trying to do better against all odds.  Rather, the “Twice-born” are those of us—yes, me—who function in life under a little cloud, who see the glass sometimes as half-empty, who at times suffer from depression.  The Optimists call us “Pessimists,” but we call ourselves “Realists” because we do not deny that life is sometimes hard, that evil exists, and that we recognize that happiness is often shallow and ignorant.  James postulates that the “Once-born” are less equipped to handle life’s difficulties, and the “Twice-born” can rebound from failure better.

Although I did not know James’ distinction, I understood his point immediately.  I had, more or less, said the same thing at various times in my life.  As a teen, I told a young lady that my ambition was not to be happy in life but to be right. She broke up with me, and today I think she is happy married to a happy man.   (In my early thirties, after one of my failures, I realized that “being right” wasn’t all that I believed it to be. Maybe all I really wanted was “to understand” and to be content with that).  While reading Gomes’ book, I researched a little more about James’ conception and learned that he, as I have come to expect, had some practical advice for us “sick-minded” folks.

1.    Instead of wallowing in our pessimism, go ahead and try to be more positive about life.  (Are we returning to a recurring theme: choosing to believe.)

2.    Instead of wallowing in our pessimism, get up and do something, take a risk.  Your best self asks for this.

3.    Instead of wallowing in our pessimism, act as if one has free will. (Here we are returning to Descartes, again. Since there are going to be thoughts in your head, you may as well think they are your thoughts. And if they are your thoughts, why not make them productive ones.)

4.    Instead of wallowing in our pessimism, know that out of the darkness can come light. From our dark times can come some of our best times.  Dark times can propel creativity.

For me, I can’t say that I am wallowing in pessimism.  I think I am fully participating in the first three of James’s recommendations.  In addition, I began this current program because I recognized retirement could be one of those dark times and decided to “head it off at the pass,” as they say in the television westerns that could fill my day here at Fernrock, if I weren’t in my study reading Peter Gomes and William James. 

Here are a couple of websites for more information about James and these ideas:  Reason and Meaning and The Pursuit of Happiness.  I am sure I will be returning to these.