A woman in horn-rimmed glasses asks the kids behind me to slap their knees. Most of them do. Then she turns to the Brownie on my left and instructs her to honk her nose. The girl complies. Finally, she looks my way and tells me to shout “Amen!” but only if I’m happy, and know that I’m happy.
I pause to consider.
Looking around the room, I see most of my fellow second-graders doing as they’re told, though a few are sitting motionless, quietly watching the others. I can’t determine whether they’re unhappy or happy without knowing it, and I suppose some of them can’t either. Gravitating to a golden mean in the face of such uncertainty, I go half way in following each of the directions: grazing my thigh, touching my nose without honking it, and mouthing “Amen” without meaning it.
I wasn’t sure I was happy, though I didn’t have any particular complaints until this song, and I usually fulfilled the roles assigned to me by people in authority. But I wasn’t inclined to make public displays of emotion, even if the person assigning me that task, the one atop the short chain of being in my second-grade classroom, was at that moment imploring us to shout “Hurray!”
I preferred not to.
If I’d studied American History or read the Transcendentalists a little earlier in my life, I might have offered a bold reply. Of course we have a right to pursue happiness, but that doesn’t mean we have to demonstrate it when somebody else snaps their fingers or stomps their feet. According to Emerson, this kind of conformity “scatters your force. It loses your time and blurs the impression of your character.” So he left us with a maxim framed as a command: “Insist on yourself, never imitate.” I already intuited as much without having read “Self-Reliance,” but I didn’t have the force of character to act with conviction on what I knew.
Even if I had wanted to advertise my feelings, I’m not sure I knew what happiness was or how to measure it, except maybe by way of comparison. I figured I had to be happier than Brian Ciocci, who always wore a moustache of crusted boogers (though I must admit, they didn’t seem to bother him much). Dan Rutkowski had a powerful foot in kickball, but when he took his socks off at night, he had to look at webbed toes, so I figured that was a wash. And it was another tie when I compared my current self to the kindergarten version. Back then we got to stand on our heads and take naps instead of going to Math class, but since it was a half-day program, we didn’t get to enjoy my favorite brown bag lunch of bologna on white bread with lukewarm mayonnaise.
If comparisons were this hard, how was I going to pinpoint where I was on some absolute scale? When I later read about Utilitarians in college, I couldn’t imagine how they’d synch up such calculations with a whole system of morality. I understood John Stuart Mill’s idea that “actions are right as they tend to produce happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness,” but equating happiness with pleasure and unhappiness with pain seemed too simple. For my purposes in second grade, estimating how the plus and minus columns offset each other was an impossible task. Did a rousing game of “kill the carrier” make up for the cacophonous squeal of recorders in Music class or a mind-numbing hour with an SRA Reader? Maybe, but they’d better throw in some bologna just to be sure.
If I narrowed the time frame to the duration of the song, the answer became much clearer: I was not pleased. I suspected the teacher was aiming for something beyond that moment, but as she asked us to demonstrate our ongoing, inward state of contentment with arbitrary outward signs, how could she be sure she was getting an accurate reading? Sure, most of us were tugging our ears, but given the social stigma associated with announcing our unhappiness, how could she know that such a sign hadn’t floated away from the thing it signified, especially after Arthur Bucken let go of his own ears and started twisting Kathy Flint’s. Kathy was so angry she could barely shout “Hurray!”
Hyperactive kids like Arthur couldn’t slow down long enough to control their impulses, let alone perform the felicific calculus that would let them alter their path toward happiness. It might not have mattered, though, at least according to those who’ve zeroed in on the “paradox of hedonism.” Even Mill agreed that the goal of happiness “was only to be attained by not making it the direct end.” People can only be happy if they “have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness…Ask yourself whether you are happy and you will cease to be so.”
So the direct run at contentment doesn’t make people any happier, especially when the chosen pleasure is masking a deeper pain. I remember a tall girl named Karen who had straight brown hair that went all the way to her waist and a quiet grace that I admired. She read and drew beautifully, produced homework that the teacher used as the answer key, and spoke in a quiet way that made me think. Unfortunately, her poverty and family trouble would eventually steer her toward diversions in middle school that became addictions by high school, and she never graduated. Neither did Jimmy Barnes, a smart, funny guy and great athlete who would start drinking daily in middle school when he realized his father wouldn’t stop his day-drinking. Until then, we knew him for his shock of blond hair, his infectious smile, and his speed on the basepaths. He seemed content, but it wasn’t going to last.
Further confusing matters on some days was the song our teacher sang just before the one I’ve been complaining about. “Hang Your Head, Tom Dooley” was about a guy who met a girl on a mountain, inexplicably stabbed her, and was left to picture himself in a lonesome valley, hanging from a white oak tree. I refused to register any sign of emotion during this song, even though the refrain was a naked attempt to elicit some tears:
Hang your head, Tom Dooley.
Hang your head and cry.
Hang your head, Tom Dooley.
Poor boy, you’re bound to die.
The pathos wasn’t lost on me; I just wasn’t going to show strong feelings in either direction because the Stoic in me always imagined another shoe was about to drop, for better or for worse.
Unable to read my blank expression, my teacher mistook my dignified apatheia, or freedom from the dictates of passion, for apathy, which is a lack of feeling altogether. She wasn’t going to stand for that. Just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there were no agnostics on the question of happiness in my second-grade classroom: if I was happy, my clapping hands or tapping toes would surely show it. What my teacher didn’t understand was that my neutral expression was actually a sign that I wanted to think before I acted. In this, I was following the lead of Aristotle, who viewed man as a rational creature (notwithstanding the Arthur Buckens of the world) and who believed that we could enjoy eudaimonia, or a flourishing of the spirit, if we followed the dictates of reason. It was from this perspective that I wondered what the rationale was for having us grunt or spin around or scratch our armpits. But I put it together when my teacher had us do all three at once: she was making monkeys out of us. This wasn’t the life of excellent rational activity that I’d been expecting when I entered elementary school.
Some kids expected less from second grade, so they practiced a kind of rotation method to distract themselves from the dread that accompanied a long school day. They devoured stolen Twinkies, sharpened pencils down to the eraser, and tied girls’ pigtails together; and they seemed genuinely immersed in these activities while they lasted. But were these worthy pursuits? Our teacher didn’t distinguish kinds of happiness, but Aristotle did, and so did Mill, who thought we ought to cater to higher order faculties: “Better a Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied.” Unfortunately, I struggled to sort through such gold leaf distinctions; they only added variables to an already complicated equation.
Aristotle’s holistic view of happiness as “joy in one’s total life situation” might appear to offer a shortcut through some of the complexities, but if I didn’t know whether I was happy in the moment, how was I going to assess all eight years of my life? So I decided to lay low and practice epokhe, suspending judgement until I knew a little more and sustaining a poker face as long as I could. Better an expressionless lump who defies the teacher than a mindless head-tapper who gives her the false impression that all is well. If the song came back around to force its central question on me, I’d shrink the time frame down and answer honestly with my silence. No, I wasn’t happy, and I knew it, just as I knew it when I was asked to smile for photographs or go to the dentist or endure my old doctor’s cold hands in my yearly physical. But the answer would have changed later in the afternoon when I ate my snack of milk and cookies in front of Gilligan’s Island. For some reason, just seeing Mary-Anne made me feel warm all over. I’m pretty sure my higher faculties were enlisted in these moments, but I suspect that my growing appreciation of Ginger drew from lower sort. Either way, the Stoics would have left me alone as they enjoyed their own ataraxia, or state of imperturbability, which depended on an understanding that joy is fleeting in any case.
Buddhists have long held a similar belief, their first Noble Truth positing that human lives are full of suffering. Proof of this was on the fingers of Peter Griffin, who was so ill-equipped for school that he was in a constant state of anxiety, biting his nails to the nub and then gnawing on the skin below them. I saw it in the permanently raised eyebrows of Michael Burnham, who always looked like an alarmed rabbit and spent a lot of time laughing out of context. I saw it in the gap where Billy Heckel’s front tooth had been before he took a stray knee to the mouth beneath the monkey bars and discovered that his parents were too poor to afford even a Chicklet for a temporary replacement. I saw it in the dark circles that formed under the eyes of Gary Patria, who couldn’t sleep at night because restless kids in the neighborhood pelted his corrugated metal house with stones. I saw it in the scowl of Stephanie Welch, whose chronic anger would remain a mystery for years, though it would probably become clearer to her once she grappled with her sexual orientation in high school. As for the other girls, their discomforts were usually a mystery to me, though I knew some of them had to do with thoughtless comments by boys, fathers, and second grade teachers.
Who knows what was going on in the homes of other kids who kept their pain closer to the vest? Whatever it was, our teacher was convinced that the essence of their lives could fit in a shoebox, because in her view, dioramas were right for every learning situation. We used them to dramatize Math problems, demonstrate scientific phenomena, depict historical events, and capture pivotal moments in books. Now she was asking us to show a typical scene from inside our homes. I cringed at the assignment. I couldn’t have explained why at the time—I was lucky to land in the family I grew up in, and I knew it—but I suspected she might be getting more than she bargained for from some of the other kids.
Still, there’s a slim chance that there was a method to her madness, that she was giving her students a chance to vent feelings they usually suppressed (which might also explain why Tom Dooley made it into our curriculum). According to this school of thought, endorsed by Thich Nhat Hanh, we must learn how to suffer well in order to find joy: “Unless we are able to face our suffering, we can’t be present and available to life, and happiness will continue to elude us.” In American society, a common consequence of the direct run at happiness is the kind of self-medication that would eventually do a number on Karen and Jimmy, an approach that prevents ailing people from addressing the underlying causes of their pain.
Victor Frankl claimed that in addition to exploring causes of our discomfort, we must focus on the sources of contentment: “Happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue…A human is not one in pursuit of happiness but rather in search of a reason to be happy…last not least through realizing the potential meaning inherent and dormant in a given situation.” Frankl cited the creation a work as one way to generate meaning, so in theory, Art class might have been a place to start. But this wasn’t likely in my town given our itinerant Art teacher’s authoritarian impulses. She rejected my abstract renderings in favor of rural scenes where thickly muscled white families engaged in the kind of wholesome activities displayed in Cheerios commercials. When she asked us to zero in for portraits, all of mine seemed to have the puckered lips and blank, pitiless gaze that I would later recognize in Donald Trump. For some reason, she liked these pictures, but they creeped me out.
More promising for a bad artist like me was the possibility of creating meaning by encountering someone, the second of the methods Frankl proposed. At that point in my life, it probably would have been a Boston athlete like Bobby Orr or Carl Yastrzemski or Jo Jo White because I figured they could pass on some of their greatness with a handshake, just as some religious traditions pass on apostolic succession through the laying on of hands. Of course, I was always open to a meeting with Mary-Anne, maybe on the desert island from which I’d rescue her after natives had taken the others.
Finally, and perhaps most relevant, Frankl saw a chance to create meaning in the ways we respond to unavoidable suffering, hints of which I could see in the manner we carried ourselves at the end of this song. Some were less dignified than others. Arthur Bucken was slithering out of his desk and extending a toe across the aisle to kick Kathy Flint, who had a long-suffering look on her face, though whether it was from the song or past encounters with Arthur I couldn’t tell for sure. Perhaps worried that he’d flub it when the teacher turned to him, Peter Griffin was having his thumb for an early lunch. Meanwhile, a girl named Allison took it all in with a slight, compassionate smile. Later a head of the Philosophy Department at Harvard, she looked as if she were on the verge of forming a grand unification theory that would explain all of this. I, on the other hand, sat there baffled, checking the clock to see when I could escape to recess, lunch, or the bus home.
At around the same time I was grappling with all of this, my father read Abraham Maslow’s Toward a Psychology of Being. I don’t know how much the book helped him in his own quest for happiness, but when I read it later, I took comfort in the notion that “self-actualized” people might be able to find clarity and contentment. They are “efficient perceivers of reality” with “an unusual ability to detect the fake, the spurious,” so they rely on their own judgment. They’re also compassionate, as if they have an inherent ability to see the shoebox diorama of everybody’s life, unlike the teacher who was making us conceal our despair with a series of ridiculous gestures, or spill our damaged guts through domestic scenes rendered in clay—scenes that invariably ended up including amputations or decapitations when the clay became too dry. If there were any self-actualizers in that group (and I’m pretty sure there were a couple), they were on their way to being happy and probably suspected as much, but they had the decency to keep it to themselves. On the other extreme were kids who never made it above the base of Maslow’s pyramid because their foundational needs, physical and emotional, were not met. And in between there were a bunch of nose-honkers and pit-scratchers who have since become Facebook-likers and Instagram-followers and enthusiastic Tweeters. I still can’t tell if they’re happy, or if they know it.
It’s as if I never made it past second grade.
