If this isn't nice

For many years, I have been trying to find a point to my life. I have this stupid naive feeling somewhere deep inside that life is supposed to mean something. I spent a few years looking, and it doesn't. Or at least I haven't found it. I tried to convince myself that life is only about being happy, and as logical as that sounds, I just can't truly buy into that belief.

My favorite book is 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I won't bore you in this blog with why, but I always find myself returning to the sections on Colonel Aureliano Buendia. If you don't know the book, he has a solitary childhood and spends much of in a laboratory making little fish out of gold. At some point, he falls in love with a young girl and they get married. Shortly after, she dies while pregnant. Almost on a whim, he begins a series of wars (32 civil wars and he loses them all) against the conservative regime. That's the short story. The part that is relevant to this blog is that as he is condemned to death, he talks of laying in his cot waiting for the execution with nothing on his mind except a blind rage. He is never executed and begins another war. At some point, just as quickly as he decided to begin the fight, he ends it. He resigns, surrenders, and returns to his workshop and makes little fish of gold until he dies. In this solitary world, he finds solace against the world and against his rage. To me, it's as powerful a story as the last page of Camus' The Stranger, after the narrator chokes the priest and says something like "... and I woke up in that morning full of stars. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, rid me of hope, I opened myself up to the gentle indifference of the world and finding it so like myself, so like a brother really, I realized I had been happy and was happy again..." He is executed the next day.

The first time I read that, I realized that was how I felt, that blind rage, that gentle worldly indifference. What is the point? Is there a point? I don't know why, I don't what I'm angry at. I have had a perfectly easy life, much better than almost everyone actually. My family is great, I have means to make a living, I can buy most things I want to buy. Somehow, it's not enough. I wish I could just sit home, watch tv, ignore the problems of the world, and be happy. I can't. I don't know what to do. I need to find my little workshop and my little goldfish.

This weekend, in a way, maybe I did. A friend was in town, someone I have known for many years although we don't keep in touch that much. We ended up sitting around waiting to go to a party, reading The Economist. She's a fiery little pistol and although we both agreed The Economist is very intelligent, I didn't actually realize what her reading it would be like. She ranted against everything! It got to the point where she would read a line, then with little puffs of smoke exhaling from her brain, yell at me about them. Arguing with the written word, she found a way to avoid her indifference. We discussed the articles for some time, she is one of the few people who not only yells at me about developing world issues, she actually kicks my ass and I hate it. It was fun, the kind of thing I don't do often and I don't always appreciate until later.

Another of my favorite authors is Kurt Vonnegut. In his book Timequake, he begins by just telling stories from his life. One of them involves his uncle and a point he made that we need to make a point of enjoying our life. At a time when everything was nice and quiet and life was good, his uncle would say, "If this isn't nice, what is?" And maybe life really isn't so bad, and maybe I will ultimately find something to soothe me. Maybe I won't. But for me, as long as I focus on the good times and keep seeking these small pleasures, I am not so angry. I am not so unhappy. Amazingly, almost without realizing it, I am happy. "...I realized I had been happy, and I was happy again..." Maybe life doesn't have a point, or maybe I will never find it. But I suppose it's not so bad. I'm sitting in my apartment listening to Billie Holiday and writing, doing something I love surrounded by books and drinking a beer. Hell, if this isn't nice what is? Maybe I should even smile.