'For the Sake of People’s Happiness'

Building on Wednesday’s post, in which Dr. Johnson and Fr. Schall urge man “to be acquainted with himself,” here is a twentieth-century writer from a very different world reiterating a similar thought and giving it a new emphasis: 

“Few people are willing to scan their own life story; even fewer are ready to turn their thoughts to the particular period of time in which they were most actively engaged in the pursuit of pleasure. The majority just shrug their shoulders, silently connive at the crimes of the age, while others eagerly justify the past.”

 

In this context, “pursuit of pleasure” ought to be liberally understood. Alcohol, drugs, sex – of course – but other behaviors as well, many not conventionally thought of as pleasure-seeking – gossip, anger, self-pity, self-righteousness, virtue-signaling, rapacity, the denunciation of others. Basically, variations on the Seven Deadly Sins in mundane disguise.

 

Nadezhda Mandelstam is writing in her second memoir, Hope Abandoned (trans. Max Hayward, 1974), in a chapter titled “Memory.” In the preceding paragraphs, in which Mandelstam comments on her generation’s behavior during the nineteen-thirties in Stalin’s Russia, she might be obliquely looking at a much-disputed phrase in our “Declaration of Independence”:

 

“In this country people were killed because they happened to know a couple of trivial facts, or refused to give up their sense of reality. In shedding all this blood, we declared it was done for the sake of people’s happiness. . . . The stupefied masses parroted the word ‘happiness’ at every end and turn, but they have still to recover from the untold miseries inflicted on them in its name. Those great days are over, and at present even the most lightweight prattlers with higher degrees and salaries to match are embarrassed to use the word ‘happiness’—they prefer to talk more modestly about the pursuit of ‘pleasure.’”  

 

A few of the books we read serve as landmarks, ways to blaze a trail through memory and our growth in understanding. When I reflect on the events of 1974, I don’t think first of working in a restaurant, interviewing the novelist John Gardner or watching as the president moves inexorably closer to resignation. No, I think of reading Hope Abandoned (several years after reading Hope Against Hope) and early translations into English of Mandelstam’s husband’s poems. Calling such books “great” is a feeble gesture. Better to acknowledge they have been incorporated into one’s sensibility. Guy Davenport said “the spirit behind every sentence is indomitable” in Mandelstam’s memoirs. Here is the remainder of the last quoted paragraph:

 

“In our benighted existence there is always a queue for any little drop of whatever promises oblivion, and everywhere else in the world there is a constant hunt for ‘pleasure’; sated by the most trivial forms of it, people are aggrieved when death suddenly approaches before they have had time to cast a backward glance at their life or the fate of their generation.”