A Season in Hell (27 page)

Recently, a study was published in the
New York Times
suggesting that “happiness” and “unhappiness,” whatever the words mean, may be genetically rooted, that people’s level of contentment in life is inherent and remains the same whatever happens to them. After decades of observation, I have come to believe this is true: the things that we believe will make us happy (love imagined to be enduring and heaps of money, say) do so only momentarily, if even that. Love never endures without pain and sacrifice, and money seems to add little to human well-being. Moreover, things we are sure would make us unhappy (physical maiming, economic loss) do not hold our spirits down more than momentarily. The only loss I believe to be a permanent source of sorrow is the loss of loved people, especially children. I used to think that great poverty was catastrophic and that people with disabilities were doomed to misery and deprivation forever. I used to think that people who accomplished much in their lives were qualitatively better off than those who had not. But the most wretched people I have ever known include some of great accomplishment, wealth, and power in the world; and among the lightest-hearted people I have ever met are the utterly impoverished, oppressed, almost enslaved peasant women of India.

Still, like losing a child, a serious illness or disaster is transforming. It changes not just our bodies and psyches but the context of desire. The field from which we choose our desires shifts under our feet; we choose differently, not just because we have changed but because we see different elements to choose among. For me, the change has been profound: my happiness quotient has changed: I am happier than I have ever been, despite my handicaps.

I was never a particularly happy or lighthearted person. As a young woman, I was extremely passionate about ideas and extremely voluble about them. I rejected religion, but took seriously a passage from Revelation:

I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot.

So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

Because thou sayest, I am rich and increased with goods, and have need of nothing; and knowest not that thou art wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked …

(3:15–16)

When I was young, each step I took out of helplessness (for me then the greatest evil) increased my satisfaction in life. Once I had work I enjoyed, I became almost content, despite a miserable marriage. And when the marriage ended, and I had work I loved, I was as close to bliss as I can imagine. Yet I was still driven, idealistically ambitious about human possibilities and angry with the world that exists. Even when I enjoyed my daily life, I lived in the future, where the ideal resided. Living in the future really means one is continually planning it, in an effort to control it—as if by thinking about it, one could make the ideal world come about. This way of being requires a belief in the future—the belief that a future exists and that one will live to see it, or at least will be able to influence it. My illness shriveled the future up and blew it away. Now I do not consider that I have a future (although I may), and I never think about it. I rarely think further than the next day. I plan only for a few months ahead (and that only recently) and always in a tentative spirit. I tacitly (silently) precede every statement of commitment by “If I live … if I am well …”

Losing the future is the best thing that ever happened to me. It altered the context of my desires, which are now limited to the present and the immediate future—that is, a few hours hence. Stuck in the present, I can devote myself to it: to daily pleasure, pleasure in the moment, pleasure in everything (or almost everything) I do. Luckily, my work has always given me huge pleasure, as do my social encounters—my children and my friends. I also love excellent food, and I do my own cooking despite my difficulty with standing for a long time. I move through the day from pleasure to pleasure like a woman walking through the halls of a great art gallery.

I no longer have large-scale desires. I no longer wish for or expect undying love, perfect harmony within my family, a life in which everything is right (which, however absurd it may be, I did desire and kept anticipating before). I have only small desires—for a glass of cold orange juice, a good book, a visit with someone I love. Not only do I have no large desires for myself; I no longer have them for the world. Coming up against the absolute limit of death destroyed my fervent belief that an ideal world could be created if only people would do
x
and
y
, believe what is before their eyes, let themselves be happier. It destroyed my absurd and unconscious belief that because I could see the ideal, I had a responsibility to help others see it, to create it. The weight of this responsibility was heavy, and carrying it made me angry. I was also angry because I was frustrated that no matter how simple it all was, it was not happening.

Coming as close to death as I did engraved on my consciousness the understanding that the ideal is not going to happen, that it was always a delusion, the daydream of a willful child, engraved upon my body by yearning and misery and helplessness like the fault tattooed on one’s body by acid-dropping needles that prick it as the sinner is turned around and around on a huge rotisserie, in Kafka’s
The Penal Colony
. Coming up against failure in so absolute a fashion calmed my anger and cooled my ambition. I am no longer driven. I no longer imagine that I can do much to help bring about the millennium of the humane ideal, or that I can change anything at all. I have relinquished my painful freight. I am free. I am permitted to enjoy myself. I have noticed that my laugh has changed, is more spontaneous, deeper. I am almost serene.

I cannot say I am happy I was sick, but I am happy that sickness, if it had to happen, brought me to where I am now. It is a better place than I have been before. I am grateful to have been allowed to live long enough to experience it.

*
Herman cites M. Horowitz,
Stress Response Syndromes
(Northvale, N.J.: Jason Aronson, 1986), 93–94. See Herman,
Trauma and Recovery
(New York: Basic, 1993), 41.

Marilyn French was a novelist and feminist. Her books include
The Women’s Room
, which has been translated into twenty languages;
From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World
;
A Season in Hell
;
Her Mother’s Daughter
;
Our Father
;
My Summer with George
; and
The Bleeding Heart
. She died in 2009.

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