Point of View: To Happiness

   “Happiness is the only sanction of life,” Santayana says at one point in his discussion of reason and how it comes to be, adding that “where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”

    I’ll drink to that, to happiness . . . however you want to define it. For me, mainly, it’s having the freedom to be your own person, or the freedom to be able to create yourself.

    “When should I stop?” an elderly man asked Sharon McCobb at the Y the other day as he was working out with weights.

    “Never!” she said.

    And so I continue on my way, reading for no particular reason books about reason (hoping something will get through), exercising my First Amendment right to be flip, and running — staggering is more like it — until I flop.

    “The knowledge that a clock striking two has struck one is a big thing, Santayana said,” I said to Mary the other night. “To know that two’s antecedent is one is a sign of progress, of forward movement.”

    But she, who has been wading through a miserable swamp of details having to do with an estate lately,  was not one to be impressed. “Frankly, I think that progress for me,” she said, “would be utter stasis.”

     Existence for her lately has been a mad and lamentable experiment, I would guess, if not worse.    

    She doesn’t have the leisure to be at leisure, to reflect, as I have been, on what it’s all about. . . . I suspect, though, that she may already know damn well what it’s all about, and that that may be the problem.

    At any rate, I am sympathetic, which, as Branch Rickey says in “42,” is a word derived from an ancient Greek one for suffering. 

    I would be in error if I left it that happiness for me lies solely in creating myself, for I cannot be myself, I don’t want to be myself, if she is not herself. Her horoscope in El Diario said recently concerning Geminis: “Todo se resolvera,” which is to say everything will work out.

    It didn’t say when, though. I hope it’s soon.