Theodora Goss

I’ve been reading a lot recently about happiness — not because I’m researching the topic, but because a lot of people seem to be writing about it, and I run across the articles. For example, the Mayo Clinic has a page called How to be Happy, subtitled “Tips for Cultivating Contentment.” There are books being written about happiness, TED talks being given about it.

These articles bother me, I suppose in part because they seem to confuse what I think are two distinct feelings: contentment and joy. The Mayo Clinic article uses the terms interchangeably. But I think they really are quite different, and happiness is a sort of general category that can encompass both.

Contentment is the feeling of being peaceful, satisfied with your circumstances. I feel content when I lie in bed on a Saturday morning and look out my window at the sky, knowing that I have a whole weekend ahead of me. It’s the feeling of not wanting things to change, because the present moment is enough. It’s the feeling of living in the present, which is what Buddhism teaches us to do. Of not desiring anything else. Contentment is essentially static.

I was wondering what pictures to include with this blog post, and I decided to take photographs of the two front corners of my apartment. This is the left corner. You can see a drawing of a tree in a field, by my grandmother. Above it is a fantasy print. And hanging from a bracket is my birdcage, with two birds (not real, of course, although they have real feathers) on the outside. I don’t put birds in cages — not even artificial ones!

In the right front corner you can see the prints I’ve put up recently — one matches the print on the left, and I just remembered that they are by Amy Brown. The watercolors are by my grandmother, and I bought the print of the green girl at Wiscon. It’s by Samantha Haney. If you want a copy of it yourself, you can find it right here: “Green Girl.” The artist’s contact information is on her website. You can also see the bed curtain I created, which I’m very happy with! (Every bed should have curtains, no matter how rudimentary.)

Living in spaces like this makes me content. Creating spaces like this gives me joy.

Joy is not contentment. It’s caused by action, change. Joy can be the result of dissatisfaction: indeed, perhaps it requires dissatisfaction. I am dissatisfied, I change something, I create — and then I feel a sense of joy. Unlike contentment, joy does not stay. It is fleeting, but it can come back. Contentment feels like swimming in a warm lake. Joy feels like standing on top of a high mountain, breathing clear, cold air. Joy is exhilarating, like a sweet, strong wine — like a Tokay. It makes you feel sharper, more aware. It can be almost painful.

If I had to choose between contentment and joy, I would take joy. But of course I want both. All the articles I’ve read on happiness seem to focus on contentment. I think it’s time they started talking about joy as well.

Honestly, I’m probably too tired to write a blog post tonight. It was a very busy weekend, and I still need to prepare for classes tomorrow, as well as finish a story that is already overdue. But I haven’t written one for a couple of night, and I’m trying to keep up the habit, so here I am. I was originally going to write tonight on the difference between contentment and joy, which is something I’ve been thinking about lately. But I’m going to save that for sometime later this week. Instead, I’m going to write about a question I asked myself today: would I rather live in the country or the city?

I asked myself this question because a friend of mine, the wonderful writer Jeffrey Ford, posted a picture of the vegetables from his garden and the fruit from his apple trees. And I found myself envying him, remembering the days when I used to make a giant pot of apple butter (apples boiled down with cider and spices), and can it for winter. I wasn’t living in the country at the time, but in Larchmont, New York, the small town from which I commuted into Manhattan. But each weekend in the fall I would pick apples in an orchard to the north (where apples were $10 a bag), and I picked so many that there was nothing to do with them but make apple butter. I think it was my way of escaping from corporate law for the weekend.

Most places I’ve lived, I’ve longed for and sometimes actually had a garden. The last time I had the space and time for one, I planted old roses, and hostas and columbines and hellebores, and fritillaries came up in the spring. It’s still a dream of mine to live in the country and have a flower garden, and a vegetable garden, and a small orchard, and herbs. Even chickens (the fancy, pouffy ones). But I also love living in the city. Tonight, as I was walking home from the market, where I needed to pick up apples and potatoes, I took some pictures of some of the lovely old brownstones on my street.

I love walking down this street, particularly in the evening when I’m pleasantly tired of walking all day, because in the city I don’t have a car and I walk all day long, unless I’m taking the T (which is what the subway goes by here). Winter is coming, which means snow and sleet. But it also means the ballet and theater season, and I get cheap or free tickets to so many things through the university. I love the life here, the people on the streets who look so individual, so interesting — I wonder what their stories could be. The beautiful parks, and the river winding through it all like a dark green serpent.

So I don’t know. I think that I would like to live in the city part of the year, and in the country the other part. Is that too silly, too ambitious? Jonathan Franzen lives in New York and Santa Cruz. I know a number of established writers who have homes in two places. I suppose I’ll have to wait and see what it’s like when I’m an established writer — assuming that ever happens! In the meantime, I’m going to enjoy the shows and the street life and the lights of the city in the evening.

I was walking by the river today, and I decided to take some pictures of the wild clematis that grows there. It’s all in bloom now, and it grows over the bushes and shrubs at the edge of the water like a scattering of white stars. Its common name is Traveler’s Joy, which I have always liked.

Walking beside the river, with the honey-sweet smell of the Traveler’s Joy in the air, I was thinking of the lies we tell, and of one central truth: Most people lie most of the time.

They don’t necessarily know that they’re lying. And it’s not necessarily verbal. You can see people walking down the street, and without saying a word they’re conveying the message “I’m normal. I’m just like you.” The older I get, and the more I know about people, the more I realize that no one is normal. As soon as you catch a glimpse beneath the surface, you realize that everyone has secret places. Everyone is hiding something. Perhaps I’m talking about this because recently I’ve been writing more, and going more deeply into my writing. And one thing you have to do, as a writer — at least the sort of writer I want to be — is tell the truth. To do that, you need to know the truth, to understand how people lie to each other and to themselves — in ways even they don’t see. Two stories I worked on this summer are first-person, which means that I’m speaking from the perspective of the character. The most important thing to know about your first-person characters is what lies they’re telling themselves — often about themselves.

Once, I met a woman who seemed to have the perfect life: beautiful suburban house; tall, handsome, wealthy husband; three beautiful children. Several years later, she walked out of her house, got into her car, and shot herself in the head. Lies are deadly, I think. Especially the ones that go “I’m normal. I’m just like you. Everything is fine.”

The people who lie least often, in my experience, are artists and writers. If you are trying to capture some sort of truth, it’s very hard to lie, even to yourself. And about yourself — artists and writers are not very good at pretending to be normal, and most of the time they don’t even try.

One reason I’m thinking about this now is that it’s a political season, and politicians seem to lie more than most people. They are the masters of saying “I’m just like you” in convincing ways. And they tap into something that I’m going to call societal lies — these are our clichés. The distinguishing feature of a cliché is self-congratulation. It is a cliché, for example, that all babies are beautiful. Of course most babies are not beautiful most of the time — babies are going through so much, it’s unfair to expect them to be beautiful as well, as though they lived in a perpetual soap commercial. But the societal lie, the cliché, works like this: “All babies are beautiful. It is good to think that babies are beautiful. Therefore, I am a good person.” You can substitute any number of phrases.

I don’t think I’m explaining this particular well, in part because I’m trying to say something complicated. When I create a character, I have to build in these levels of complication. That woman I knew: how long did she tell herself that she was happy? That she loved her house and her husband and her children? Perhaps she did, but if so, that truth was partial — there was a hidden place, a secret in the darkness.

I have met people who achieve a kind of normalcy, who live and believe the clichés. I always find them frightening, because there is so much they have had to not see in order to get there. They have often had to insist on normalcy, in themselves and others. They are not creative — they can be difficult even to talk to, because one does not know what to say. There is only so long one can talk about the latest television shows.

When I lived in the suburbs, I had such a long commute that by the end of the day, I was too tired to cook. That was when I bought a microwave, for the first time in my life. It was so easy, at the end of a tiring day, to put something in the microwave — something that someone else had prepared.

Here in the city, my commute is about ten minutes, so I’m trying to cook again. And you know what? I’ve forgotten how. Cooking is easy — when you know how to do a few basic things, like make a cream soup, you can vary them endlessly. But you have to develop a sort of instinct — it’s the instinct that tells you when the onions are done or a soup is thickened enough. That’s the instinct I seem to have lost. I think it will come back fairly quickly — it’s just a matter of practice.

Yesterday, I made Burnt Cauliflower Soup. It wasn’t actually supposed to be burnt: that happened by accident. I ate it anyway, because I hate throwing away food. But today I made a perfectly lovely cream of zucchini soup for dinner. It looked like this:

The next step is to start baking again, but that will have to wait until the dial on the oven is fixed: the oven is rather old, and the dial on which the temperatures are marked turns around by itself — and wouldn’t be much help anyway since many of the numbers have faded off. As soon as the new one comes, I can start making brownies and cookies and clafouti.

All of these things may sound small and silly, but I’ve come to miss food that has a certain flavor — it’s the flavor of anything made by hand rather than commercially. And it can be very simple — freshly baked bread with butter and sliced ham, along with a mug of tea. But there’s a freshness to it, a flavorfulness that commercial food doesn’t have.

When you can do it by instinct, it becomes a sort of dance, and that’s when it’s best and most fulfilling. Perhaps that’s true of anything: I do my best writing when it’s like a mental dance. I can feel it too, the sensation — as though the words were dancing, or I were dancing with them, and we can both hear the music, and the way the story is supposed to go. We follow the steps of the dance, together — it’s a partnership in which my partner is language itself. That’s when it’s best — and when the story comes out right.

I’ve spent all day working on my teaching materials for this semester. One of the classes I’m teaching is called Fairy Tales and Literature, and I thought you might like to see the reading list.

We’re going to start with J.R.R. Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stoires” and then talk about his ideas in relation to Madame de Beaumont’s “Beauty and the Beast” and Angela Carter’s two Beauty and the Beast stories: “The Courtship of Mr. Lyon” and “The Tyger’s Bride.” That will be our introductory section. Then, we’re going to talk about the meaning and method of fairy tales, so we’re going to get into Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment. That will give us some theories to use when discussing four fairy tales and literary reinterpretations of them. Here’s what the list looks like:

Charles Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and “Little Red Cap” by the Brothers Grimm, with James Thurber’s “The Little Girl and the Wolf” and Carter’s “In the Company of Wolves.”

“Cinderella” by the Brothers Grimm and “Catskin” by Joseph Jacobs, with Aimee Bender’s “Donkeyskin” and Kelly Link’s “Catskin.”

Perrault’s “Bluebeard” with Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blue-Bearded Lover,” Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg,” and Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber.”

We’re also going to read what Bettelheim and Maria Tatar have to say about all of these fairy tales. There will be some more theoretical material, including by Marina Warner and Jack Zipes. And then we will get into Jane Eyre, which I’m going to teach as a series of fairy tale structures.

Here are the books we will be using:

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me, edited by Kate Berhneimer
Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber
The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar

And of course the Bettelheim and Jane Eyre.

I will probably be writing about this material as the semester goes on. I decided to teach the class because there was just so much fairy tale stuff coming out: and you know, I wonder why. Why now? Perhaps it has to do with Tolkien’s idea that fairy tales promise us eucatastrophe, the happy ending. We all hope, perhaps against hope, that there is a happy ever after out there somewhere. Me, I believe in happy endings. I think that sometimes we have to make them, but I think they exist. I like that line from The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel: if it’s not happy, it’s not the end yet.

Here is the illustration I’m using for the class website:

It’s a picture of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf by Gustave Doré. Of course, not all versions of fairy tales end happily — there is the Little Red Riding Hood who is eaten up! I suppose that’s eucatastrophe for the wolf. But I agree with Tolkien that the happy ending is intrinsic to the fairy tale, perhaps not as it started, but as it has become.

What I’m wondering right now is, what sorts of story ideas will teaching fairy tales give me this semester? I’m looking forward to finding out.

I spent most of today moving a sofa. It was not a particularly good day to move a sofa. University classes all over Boston start next week, so all over Boston this weekend, students are moving into their dormitories or apartments. The streets are clogged by moving vans, the sidewalks are thronging with parents. It was difficult just getting a van to move it in, and no matter how small a sofa is — and this is a very small sofa, actually a loveseat — you can’t move it in a car.

I’m relieved that it’s been moved, because now that it’s in the apartment, I’m absolutely done with all the furnishing. All I still need to do is hang pictures and put books on the shelves. And I’m glad to be in that position before classes start. But this sofa is actually my second attempt to finish furnishing the apartment, and those two attempts made me think of my practical versus my romantic impulses.

In my first attempt, I bought something quite different: something like a small futon. I thought it would be practical: easier than a sofa to transport and useful because it could be folded out into a second bed. It would also be easy to clean because the cover could be put into the wash. But once I had brought it to the apartment and set it up, I discovered that while it fit — I had measured carefully before buying it, of course — the proportions were completely off. It was too large visually, and there was something shapeless about it — as there is about most futon-like things. I had already spent a significant amount of money on it: $275. And it was all wrong.

So what did I do? Well, right now it’s in a basement, and I’ll see if I can find some other use for it or give it away. But when I saw it in the apartment, I had that feeling in my stomach: the feeling I always have when I’ve made a wrong decision. It’s like being sick. It’s a feeling I had in law school — I recognize it well. It’s the feeling of being on the wrong road. When I’ve made the right decision, I feel happy and free, no matter how impractical that decision is.

I especially regretted my initial decision the next day, when I walked into my favorite Goodwill store and saw a small sofa for only $20. Of course it would cost money to transport, and it was somewhat battered and stained, but I immediately knew that it would fit the space I had perfectly. Underneath the hard use it had experienced, it had good lines. It was a perfectly ordinary sofa, really — but it had grace.

I think things are only worth buying if you fall in love with them.

So I paid for the sofa, and today I transported it to the apartment. The initial purchase had been a mistake, but why compound my mistake by keeping it? Instead, I paid more to fix my mistake — to buy what should have gone into my apartment in the first place. Here’s how the sofa looks now:

I learned two things from this. First, I learned that I should always trust that sick-to-the-stomach feeling. It tells me what I should not do, and that’s always valuable. Second, I learned that when I follow my practical instincts, I am often wrong, but when I follow my romantic instincts, I am always right. It is when I make a decision out of love and joy, a sense of rightness and freedom, that I end up making the right decision — the one that actually turns out to be the most practical in the end.

I need to remember that, even when it comes to a sofa.

I’ve been doing all sorts of things over the last few days: my deadlines have deadlines! But one thing I’ve had to do, because it needed to be done, is refinish a table. There are two pieces of furniture I’ve needed in the apartment, and one is a small table on which I can eat meals and grade papers. The table is all done now. This is what it looks like:

It looks so finished that it’s difficult, even for me, to imagine that several days ago, it was just a disassembled table of unfinished wood. I had help with the assembly, but I did all the staining and finishing myself. It was very simple: just Minwax Golden Oak stain from the hardward store, and then Minwax Antique Oil Finish. And the table itself is not an expensive table, although it is solid wood: alder, a step up from unfinished pine.

But there’s something about it — I don’t know if it’s evident from the picture, although it is to me — that seems authentic. It has an authenticity to it. I think that’s what I look for in just about everything, nowadays: a sense of the authentic. I found it in these teacups and saucers that I bought at Goodwill:

The funny thing is that I found them on different days, first the teacups and then the saucers. I look for that authenticity in furniture, in clothes, in poems. In food, even. So I’m wondering what exactly it is. In part, it has to do with what something is made from. My table is solid wood. It’s held together by wooden dowels and metal screws. There is no plastic in it. The clothes I tend to buy are made of cotton or silk or something else that is real. I try to eat real food, not food that has been processed into inauthenticity — into becoming something that is no longer food.

But there is something more to it than simply materials. I put significant labor into that table. Those teacups and saucers have transferware patterns that were applied by hand. So there is labor, human labor, that went into them. The table itself will become more authentic, more itself, as it ages: as I use it, as it acquires scratches, which are scars on wood. So I suppose age and use made something authentic.

It’s hard to pinpoint, really: why some things seem real and some don’t. But when something is inauthentic, it feels as though it doesn’t belong — as though I need to get rid of it as quickly as possible. It makes me uncomfortable.

What I’m trying for in my writing is always authenticity, but again, I’m not quite sure where it lies. What is an authentic voice? A voice that is itself — and yet it takes a great deal of time and training to find a voice that is authentically your own. You have to get rid of all the other voices first, of the facile writing. If only this writing thing were easier! And yet, I could simply go to Ikea and buy a table. No staining or finishing required. But it would be Ikea furniture: with some pretention to design, but half plyboard. It would feel inauthentic. And so I take the time to create a table that feels authentic — that I can use for the rest of my life.