Misery Preserves The Happy Man
And how many new ideals are, at bottom, still possible!
—Here is a new ideal I stumble upon once every five weeks
in a wild and lonely walk,
in an azure moment of sinful happiness.
to spend one’s life amid delicate and absurd things;
a stranger to reality; half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician;
with no care for reality, except now and then to acknowledge it
in the manner of a good dancer with the tips of one’s toes;
always tickled by some sun ray of happiness;
exuberant and encouraged even by misery—
for misery preserves the happy man;
fixing a little humorous tail even to the holiest of things;
this, it is obvious, is the ideal of a heavy hundredweight spirit
–a spirit of gravity.
March-July 1888*
The topic was uncertainty, the essay entitled The Value of Uncertainty. I felt dissatisfied with our discussion. Somehow had we not transposed, reversed the whole matter? Are we not absurdly attempting to attribute value to uncertainty when uncertainty, adventitious events have been the unbidden bane of life from now to the very beginnings of history? All of our efforts can be understood as our attempt to enlarge the zone of freedom and well-being, to reduce the felt randomness both within and without. Reducing the randomness within, why that would be the formation of religion, the imagining of a transcendent being “above” us, to watch over us. Constraining the randomness without, that would be the cultivation of culture and what we call civilization: architecture, poetry, Starbucks coffee in a festive red and green cup.
In a strange, weird, idiotic manner I value uncertainty.
Turning the ignition key of the Kia Forte, near to the appearance of dawn light, I push a button to activate change in the fuel management and another button to alter the shift points of the transmission. Onto Fabyan Parkway the vehicle leaps forward — mind and body feels (knows) that care is paramount. Waiting at the light to make the long sweeping turn at Rt 25, at the green, — the tachometer slowly rises to make the turn, then the engine screams reaching 60 mph in a second or two, racing north parallel to the river…
But enough, “an azure moment of sinful happiness.” After all the speed limit is 45mph and it’s barely light. Uncertainty, in a small dose!
The car is merely a Kia Forte.
- excerpt On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille, trans. by Stuart Kendall, p. 71
