`Hold It Not a Sin to Regain Your Cheerfulness'

I have exchanged e-mails with a high-school acquaintance I haven’t seen since graduation in 1970. Like me, he stumbled into journalism and now edits a weekly newspaper in Georgia. We weren’t friends, precisely. We met in a writing class but I was morbidly bookish and Mark was socially well-adjusted, even athletic. We cut school together on April 22, 1970, in observance of the first Earth Day. It was sunny and warm in Cleveland, excellent for truancy, and we attended a poetry reading/revival meeting conducted by Lawrence Ferlinghetti in a church downtown.

Mark and I caught up quickly and he told me his sister was murdered several years ago in Los Angeles, and he has become the family advocate in the case against her killer. It seemed inappropriate to ask for details, something I could do as a reporter without hesitation. Here’s a guy who always impressed me as unnaturally happy and big-hearted. After 37 years, I still picture him smiling, showing lots of teeth, like the logo for optimism. Now his sister is dead and he wants to know about my life.

Of all people, Mark reminds me of John Keats. When the poet was nine, his father died after falling from a horse. His grandfather, with whom the Keats children had gone to live, died the following year. When Keats was 15, his mother died of tuberculosis, and his brother Tom died eight years later of the same disease. By that time, Keats had also contracted TB, which would kill him in 1821 at the age of 25. If anyone had an excuse to indulge in rapacious self-pity, it was Keats, though his family history was hardly unusual in early-19th-century England. When we read his letters, however, he often sounds like the family cheerleader. On Oct. 14, 1818, six weeks before Tom’s death, in a letter to his brother George, Keats writes:

“Our’s are ties which independent of their own Sentiment are sent us by providence to prevent the deleterious effects of one great, solitary grief. I have Fanny [Keats, their sister] and I have you – three people whose Happiness to me is sacred – and it does annul that selfish sorrow which I should otherwise fall into, living as I do with poor Tom who looks upon me as his only comfort – the tears will come into your Eyes – let them – and embrace each other – thank heaven for what happiness you have and after thinking a moment or two that you suffer in common with all Mankind hold it not a sin to regain your cheerfulness.”

For Keats, happiness was a moral imperative. A taste of earthly Hell tests us, shriveling some into hard, spiky cinders, annealing others into strength and resilience. Ten months before the letter cited above, in a letter to his brothers George and Thomas, Keats formulated his notion of “Negative Capability,” which he defined as “when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.” This is conventionally glossed as the kernel of Keats’ aesthetic, though it might shed light on his irrepressibility.

As I was writing this, my oldest son sent an mp3 of “Young But Daily Growin’,” a traditional ballad covered by Bob Dylan on the Basement Tapes. The performance is masterful and heartbreaking. Dylan’s control of tune, sustained over seven verses and more than five and a half minutes, is flawless. Here is the second-to-last verse:

“At the age of sixteen, he was a married man,
And at the age of seventeen he was a father of a son,
And at the age of eighteen years, 'round his grave the grass grew long
Cruel death had put an end to his growin’.”