Thoughtful contemplations on the pursuit to be happy.
The longtime New Yorker writer waxes philosophical in this slim, aphoristic book.
Gopnik, author of The Real Work, offers an extended essay on a positive and pleasing emotion. When he was 12, the author started to play guitar, and he recalls how happy he was when he first learned how to create “the ringing beauty of the G chord.” “The sense of happiness I felt that week remains resonant,” he writes. Next, Gopnik discusses the young Scottish poet Don Paterson’s obsession with Japanese origami. “Genuine happiness,” he writes, “is always rooted in absorption in something outside us, and begins in accomplishment undertaken for its own sake and pursued to its own odd and buzzing ends.” He argues that accomplishment counts for far more than the “tyranny” of achievement because “it’s more compelling than the concreteness, the trophy pressed in your hands.” Furthermore, “learning to work hard is as important as learning to work well.” Gopnik loves to cook at home, and chopping onions is “my entry to happiness.” For French painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, playing a violin wasn’t just a hobby; it was a “parallel passion, and it fed the already fully achieved virtuosic technical level of his primary art.” Thinking back on his guitar practicing, Gopnik writes, “accomplishment is bounded by the eternal truths of repetition and habituation and exhaustion and renewal.” He posits a “pluralism of pleasures” that extends deeply into our imaginations and practices, and he is a big believer in open societies because they provide more space for accomplishment. Some of the other things that bring the author happiness are the music of the Beatles; walking and biking in Central Park, admiring the work of “one of my personal heroes,” Frederick Law Olmsted; and, of course, the act of writing.
Thoughtful contemplations on the pursuit to be happy.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781324094852
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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