Book by Book (11 page)

5. Children's stories. Christmas is primarily for children, or so they say, and there's nothing like sharing a good picture book with a young boy or girl to generate that longed-for shared seasonal contentment. Consider those wordless classics, Raymond Briggs's
The Snowman
and Peter Spier's
Christmas
, any illustrated version of Clement Moore's
A Visit from St. Nicholas
(the older the pictures the better), Russell Hoban's touching
The Mole Family's Christmas
, William Joyce's adventure-filled
Santa Calls
, Barbara Robinson's very funny novel
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
, Chris Van Allsburg's
The Polar Express
, or the perennially popular
How the Grinch Stole Christmas
by Dr. Seuss.

6. Of course, there's a long list of sui generis holiday favorites: Max Beerbohm's perfectly pitched set of literary parodies,
A Christmas Garland;
Milton's ode “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity”; P. G. Wodehouse's hilarious “Jeeves and the Yuletide Spirit”; that gallows-humored chiller by John Collier, “Back for Christmas”; Arthur C. Clarke's disturbing science fiction miniatare,
“The Star”; Somerset Maugham's beautifully crafted novel of lost illusions,
Christmas Holiday;
any number of Tolstoy's compassionate and inspiring parables, especially “Where Love Is, God Is”; and, not least, Damon Runyon's inimitable account of “The Three Wise Guys.”

Though books can obviously help create a holiday spirit, do not neglect other traditional activities. Listen to Christmas songs on the radio. Go caroling in your neighborhood. Take in a performance of Handel's
Messiah
or Tchaikovsky's
Nutcracker.
At the least, put up a few colored lights, a wreath, maybe some holly or mistletoe. Light the candles. Bake gingerbread and sugar cookies. Help the less fortunate. Even if you don't observe Christmas, be with those you love, be festive and thankful. Rejoice.

I assure you, doctor, it is a relatively simple matter for a weathered charlatan like myself to keep up interest in so small a carnival as this.                                                                              
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

According to the seventeenth-century divine Thomas Fuller, “We are born crying, live complaining, and die disappointed.” In other words, life is real! life is earnest! Philosophers and moral essayists, tragic dramatists and unhappy poets all agree about this. As a consequence, the tone of most reflections on this world tends toward the meditative, melancholy, and disenchanted. Woe, woe, and more woe— it's downhill all the way, the paths of glory lead but to the grave, and stoic endurance would seem the best we can aim
for. “If a man has learnt to think,” says Tolstoy, “no matter what he may think about, he is always thinking of his own death.”

And yet. “Unmitigated seriousness is always out of place in human affairs,” counsels the philosopher George Santayana, adding, “Let not the unwary reader think me flippant for saying so; it was Plato, in his solemn old age, who said it.” Certainly if there is any worldly talent worth cultivating, it's a sense of humor. To possess a cheerful outlook may be the greatest gift of the gods, the distant second best being a taste for irony. Such temperaments allow one to step back from painful situations and view them with a little detachment. Why else do we live, concluded Jane Austen, but “to make sport for our neighbours and laugh at them in return”? To the genial-spirited anything that happens can be shrugged off as yet another part of “life's rich pageant.”

But how can one acquire such an upbeat attitude? In the same way we acquire all our habits—through practice. Psychologist William James discovered that if one pretended to be happy, this “going through the motions” would by itself lead to an improved mood. In other words: Act as you would like to be. It pays to picture the sort of character you present to the world. Do you want to be regarded as a whiner, a self-pitying hypochondriac, a man without backbone, a woman without pride? We all admire those who can control themselves, who—to use cliches—look on the bright side or possess a sunny disposition. The world, it's said, may be a tragedy for those who feel, but it can be a comedy, or at least a comedy of errors, for those who think.

“The most effective weapon of any man is to have reduced his share of histrionics to a minimum.” This was the watchword of
André Malraux, the French novelist, adventurer, art historian, politician. Malraux believed in maturity, in being a grown-up. While our natural tendency may be to exaggerate our sorrows and fears, things often don't turn out as badly as expected. Nevertheless, we all tend to get caught up in emotional situations, carried away by our own sense of personal melodrama. In short, we overreact, indeed overact, performing for an audience, whether real or imagined. Instead of adopting such staginess, we should remind ourselves that clarity is as much a mental and emotional virtue as it is a stylistic one. Do we really feel this riot of emotion? Is there any point to all this brouhaha? Should a grown-up behave like this?

Father Anthony de Mello, a Jesuit teacher with a taste for Zenlike parables, published a series of books in which he emphasized how much our pervasive sense of unhappiness in the world arises from our attachments. For a Catholic priest he sometimes sounds positively Buddhist in his insistence that the source of emotional anguish is a “state of clinging caused by belief that without some particular thing or some person you cannot be happy.” He explains in
The Way to Love
that “the tragedy of an attachment is that if its object is not attained it causes unhappiness. But if it is attained, it does not cause happiness—it merely causes a flash of pleasure followed by weariness, and it is always accompanied, of course, by the anxiety that you may lose the object of your attachment.” To be genuinely happy one actually needs to rid the self of worldly entanglements. Purity and stillness, said Lao-tzu, are the correct principles for humankind.

No doubt such austerity works. And yet “what really makes one indignant about suffering isn't the thing itself but the senselessness
of it.” That's a sentence by Nietzsche, who endured debilitating headaches, increasing blindness, eventual insanity, and an early death. The English essayist William Hazlitt was even more explicit: “Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be.” During periods of crisis somber moods return to attack even the most Falstaffian among us. Insofar as we are human, feelings of loss and regret are sometimes unavoidable, but we should remain keenly wary of overindulging them. In Benjamin Disraeli's words, “Grief is the agony of an instant: the indulgence of grief is the blunder of a life.”

Easy enough to say, and we are still likely to fail at the sticking point. Yet a certain sangfroid, urbanity, or wit may be cultivated even in the face of mortal illness. A year or two before he died in his early fifties, the English critic Kenneth Tynan one afternoon detected a yellow discharge from his penis. He ruefully noted in his diary: “Bankruptcy, emphysema, paralysis of the will—and now this! Feel that God is making his point with rather vulgar overstatement.”

Just writing those two sentences must have helped Tynan confront his despair, even as its unexpected humor makes a reader smile. Boethius argued for “the consolation of philosophy” and rightly too, but comic and worldly writers remind us of the “Consolation of Personal Style.” We want to go out just as we lived, true to ourselves, with a quip and a blazing six-gun like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or like James Thurber's Walter Mitty, facing his imaginary firing squad, “with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips.”

To read Congreve, Moliere, Voltaire, and Austen, or Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank, and Barbara Pym is to enter, for a while, a world of ease and verbal felicity. Writers like S. J. Perelman and G. K. Chesterton aren't merely humorists; they are palliatives for the human condition; sources of light and optimism. For me, in particular, P. G. Wodehouse—master of silly situations and dizzying similes—possesses the wand of the enchanter:

“What a girl! He had never in his life before met a woman who could write a letter without a postscript, and this was but the smallest of her unusual gifts.”

“He resembled ... in his general demeanour one of those unfortunate gentlemen in railway station waiting-rooms who, having injudiciously consented at four-thirty to hold a baby for a strange woman, looks at the clock and sees that it is now six-fifteen and no relief in sight.”

“The unpleasant, acrid smell of burnt poetry.”

“Myrtle Prosser was a woman of considerable but extremely severe beauty. She .. . suggested rather one of those engravings of the mistresses of Bourbon kings which make one feel that the monarchs who selected them must have been men of iron, impervious to fear, or else shortsighted.”

Some conjurors say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither, my friend, neither. It's number one.—Charles Dickens (spoken by Fagin in
Oliver Twist)

There is a demand today for men who can make wrong appear right.—Terence

The two principal requisites in a courtier are a flexible conscience, and an inflexible politeness.  —Lady Blessington

Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves? —Mary Wollstonecraft

History “is all full. And dripping. With the corpses. Of them who trusted the incorruptible.”—China Mieville

A horse does not understand that it has been born into the world to pull carts. It thinks it is here to be beaten. It thinks of a cart as a huge object it is tied to so that it cannot run away while it is being beaten.—J. M. Coetzee

The Washington elite is always assuring the president that “the time has come for harder choices, when the hardest choices they'd ever made, once they got through multiple choice in college, were listed on menus and wine lists.”—James McCourt

In the battle between the world and you, back the world.   —Franz Kafka

What matters most in a civilized world? According to the philosopher Bertrand Russell, “The thing, above all that a teacher should endeavour to produce in his pupils if democracy is to survive, is the kind of tolerance that springs from an endeavour to understand those who are different from ourselves.” His contemporary George Santayana made essentially the same point in reverse: “The surest way to corrupt a young man is to teach him to esteem more highly those who think alike than those who think differently.” This doctrine was stated even more tellingly centuries ago by the even greater thinker Benedict Spinoza:
“Sedulo curavi humanas actiones non ridere non lugere neque detestari, sed intelligere.”—
“I have laboured carefully, when faced with human actions, not to mock, not to lament, not to execrate, but to understand.”

Such tolerance ranks at the top of the civic virtues. Yet some writers criticize this view as leading to a kind of situational ethics, one that precludes moral judgment or firm action. As the French say,
“Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardoner'”
—to understand all is is to forgive all.

But should one? Aristotle concluded that we each remain accountable for the sort of person we are. If a man was sexually abused as a child, this may explain why he might have become an abuser as an adult, but cannot expunge his culpability: Our actions define our moral character. Carry tolerance and understanding too far, after all, and you could claim that none of our behavior is volitional, that everything is entirely conditioned, outside our control, and thus excusable.

Still, one can duly understand the historic explanations for evil and injustice without, for example, pardoning racism or the exploitation of the poor and disenfranchised. Besides, sometimes even the most righteous-seeming actions can be subtly coarsening or even morally injurious; we have heard since childhood that those who live by the sword perish by the sword and that those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. Heartbreakingly, in order to defeat our enemies, we have often adopted their methods. To this day the decisions to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as the intense firebombing of German cities like Dresden, are hotly debated: Were these measures intended to end the war more quickly, or were they largely expressions of bloodlust and a desire for revenge?

We should always be exceptionally alert to any situation, political or personal, that generates a strongly emotional, hot-button reaction. No real patriot, insisted Chesterton, “would ever say, ‘My country, right or wrong.' It is like saying, ‘My mother, drunk or sober.'” The psychologist Georg Groddeck shrewdly remarked, “Whatever you condemn, you have done yourself,” and, as Cyril Connolly knew, the man who merely fears noises as a child will hate them as an adult. More often than not, that which we find repugnant in the outside world we cannot quite acknowledge as an aspect of ourselves.