In his 1928 poem The Stare’s Nest by my Window, which ponders the anguish of civil war, Yeats writes “we had fed the heart on fantasies; the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” An unusual and rather cryptic line that I first encountered in Tim O’Brien’s 1981 novel The Nuclear Age, in which the protagonist wends his way through a life defined by episodic rebellion and failing mental health, all set against a backdrop of impending nuclear war. Shorn of its original context, I originally took the line as a description of a person grown bitter having loitering too long in the what if realm of unrealised fantasy. I copied the line down on a post-it and tacked it beneath my computer monitor for further reflection. The original poem, however, presents a different context, where the bitterness of conflict has tempered the underlying humanitarian instincts of the speaker to a protective indifference, while also finding solace in the simple things – the toils of honey bees, swallows nesting in the eaves, while all around them humanity crumbles.
Ever the cheerful nihilist, E.M Cioran notes that the sensation of disgust is one (of several) that differentiates humans from other animals. The experience of disgust, or so he says, is one that “separates us from the world, shows how destructible is the solidity of our instincts or the consistency of our attachments.” One intriguing point of connection between Yeats, O’Brien and Cioran is how easily our imagined world begins to fall apart when our attachments - those cohesive anchors that root us in the day-to-day familiarity of our lives, are taken away.
I find myself wondering if the notion of happiness is something now so firmly rooted in materialism that we struggle to see beyond it. The ads are certainly seductive, each offering a different, better, objectively happier version of your old self and one worth investing in. And while money can’t buy you love as the Beatles opined in ‘64, a lack of it can certainly aggravate unhappiness.
Perhaps “pleasure” is a better word, or simply a lack of unhappiness. Freud’s earlier work pointed to the pleasure principle, which defines the first stages of human development when our infant primordial selves demand basic nourishment and satisfaction. As this instinct evolves, so does our ability to seek pleasure/satisfaction in an ever more complex social setting – we can’t, for instance, continue in our adult lives shitting and screaming when we want something without some kind of unwanted intervention from concerned parties. At a minimum, pleasure is the absence of suffering, but at a higher level it begins to resemble an excess or overflow of contentment. I take pleasure from reading and watching films, but does reading and watching films make me happy or happier, or simply offset feelings of discontent? The best we can hope for is an abundance of contentment and a life punctuated with interesting distractions and residual comfort. Family, friends, enough money to cover the essentials with some left over for savings, an absence of unhealthy stress, good food, a home, a sense of purpose, love, companionship – all of these things would surely make the list of life’s nourishing essentials.
In an observation that echoes some of the central teachings of Buddhism, Freud argues that human desire cannot, in the main, be fulfilled. He goes on to qualify this in saying that what we most desire typically lies slightly out-of-reach, which in turn creates motivation and a sense of purpose, however fleeting that might be. This age-old philosophical conundrum comes back to us in commonplace metaphors like the grass is greener or the road not taken. At any rate, it is fundamentally a life define by lack, or the absence of the sublime object or experience that might ultimately satisfy us. In this context, my original reading of Yeats might stand after all, with the heart having grown brutal on a diet of too much fanciful wish-thinking. Where these fantasies originate, and whether they are either healthy or insidiously contrived brings us inevitably back to the metaphysical.