20 Feb There is nothing like engaging in an activity that yields great pleasure to bring a person fully into the here and now (Daniel Klein) | Part B’
Being a hedonist of any stripe is a choice we have. But making that choice often involves challenging the rules and customs of our culture, tribe, religion, and family.
We do not need to opt for the wild and bawdy hedonism of an Aristippus to come up against “inherited truths” that stand between us and our fondest pleasure. Simply deciding, after an expensive college education, that our greatest pleasure would be to work on an organic farm can be a formidable challenge. Nietzsche sees meeting this challenge, whatever it may be, as necessary to becoming fully human.
I am more convinced than ever that each individual has the capacity to consciously choose his own reason for living, whether that means becoming a committed Episcopalian, a Freedom Fighter, or a beach bum—or possibly all three. I also believe that deliberately choosing that meaning and then owning it makes our lives richer—more “authentic,” as Sartre would say—than if we simply let our lives happen. I guess that makes me a bona fide Existentialist.
Still, I feel more than a little foolish about offering even this bit of advice on how to live. Binx Bolling, in my favorite passage of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, has the final word on folks who propound life credos:
I listen every night at ten to a program called This I Believe […]On the program hundreds of the highest-minded people in our country, thoughtful and intelligent people, people with mature inquiring minds, state their personal credos. The two or three hundred I have heard so far were without exception admirable people […]
If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings. And as for themselves: it would be impossible for even a dour person not to like them.
Tonight’s subject is a playwright who transmits this very quality of niceness in his plays. He begins: “I believe in people.
I believe in tolerance and understanding between people. I believe in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual—”
Everyone on This I Believe believes in the uniqueness and dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are hardly unique themselves, are in fact like peas in a pod.
Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It
Daniel Klein