We had occasion on one of our trips to England to be entertained by a vivacious and imaginative boy of five years. He wanted us to play the old fashioned, and now out of favor, card game similar to “Old Maid” or “Go Fish” called “Happy Family.” We feigned ignorance of the rules of the game and gave him free rein in guiding us through it. In startlingly adult fashion, he made up the rules as we went along, which always seemed to favor him!
On a later visit, the little fellow’s grandparents patiently shepherded us around Barnstaple, Devon until we found a deck of our own, which the shop keeper found in a box under a counter. The game has gone from the shops because it is no longer politically acceptable to define a family
in the old sense of parents and their offspring. I think the current zeitgeist also mitigates against examining the nature of happiness, casting doubt on its existence, as it likewise casts doubt on the eternal Source of all goodness and happiness.
The quest for happiness in a shallow, trite sense is in the domain of the “selfie,” in all of its social media forms. The quest leaves many exhausted and empty. This sickness is just the latest variant of a disease that first manifested itself in Eden. J.R.R. Tolkien believed that an imaginative
story could be a means of recovery, or even “a prophylactic against loss.” [Tol p. 77] In his insightful work, “On Fairy Stories,” he wrote:
Recovery (which includes return and renewal of health) is a re-gaining–regaining of a clear view. I do not say “seeing things as they are”… though I might venture to say “seeing things as we are (or were) meant to see them” –as things apart from ourselves. [p. 77]
He posits that “this triteness is really the penalty of “appropriation”: the things that are trite, or (in a bad sense) familiar, are the things we have appropriated, legally or mentally. We say we know them. They have become like the things that once attracted us by their glitter, or their colour, or their shape, and we laid hands on them, and then locked them up in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.” [p. 77]
Happiness is one of those treasures. We think it is easy. We think we know what it looks like, and generally the shape and size of what attracts us seems a perfect fit for our self. But in a world in which “all that glitters is sold as gold,”[nas] we need to step back and look again. As Tolkien observed, “We need, in any case, to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of triteness or familiarity.”
My story, which will be presented in installments, has some of the elements that most readers recognize as belonging to fairy tales. C. S. Lewis, friend and colleague of Tolkien, wrote an essay entitled “Sometimes Fairy Stories Say Best What’s to Be Said.” [Lew] Tolkien supported that idea: “But it is one of the lessons of fairy stories… that on callow, lumpish, and selfish youth peril, sorrow, and the shadow of death can bestow dignity, and even sometimes wisdom.” [p. 67]
Considering the fact that we are all “callow, lumpish, and selfish” at times, I hope my story may do some little good for any readers who may happen upon it.
[tol] Tolkien, J. R.R. The Tolkien Reader. New York: Ballentine Books, 1966.
[nas] Nash, Ogden. “Look What You Did, Christopher!”
[lew] Lewis, C. S. Of Other Worlds. New York: Harcourt Books, 1994 ed
