Literary Journal #14 - Hector and the Search for Happiness

 
    I remember writing a journal about this book last year. But I'm writing this blog post about this book again because my perspective and understanding of the book have changed over an year. The novel is about a psychiatrist who travels around the world to find out what really makes people happy. He first travels to China, Africa and then America(although it is not explicitly named). As he travels along, he experiences different events that awakens him in the way of knowing how to achieve happiness and writes down in this notebook 23 ways of becoming happy. Hector writes,

Lesson 1: Making comparisons can spoil your happiness.
Lesson 2: Happiness often comes when least expected.
Lesson 3: Many people see happiness only in their future.
Lesson 4: Many people think that happiness comes from having more power or more money.
Lesson 5: Sometimes happiness is not knowing the whole story.
Lesson 6: Happiness is a long walk in the mountains.
Lesson 7: It’s a mistake to think that happiness is the goal.
Lesson 8: Happiness is being with the people you love.
Lesson 8b: Unhappiness is being separated from the people you love.
Lesson 9: Happiness is knowing your family lacks for nothing.
Lesson 10: Happiness is doing a job you love.
Lesson 11: Happiness is having a home and a garden of your own.
Lesson 12: It’s harder to be happy in a country run by bad people.
Lesson 13: Happiness is feeling useful to others.
Lesson 14: Happiness is to be loved for exactly who you are.
Lesson 15: Happiness comes when you feel truly alive.
Lesson 16: Happiness is knowing how to celebrate.
Lesson 17: Happiness is caring about the happiness of those you love.
Lesson 18: Happiness could be the freedom to love more than one woman at the same time.
Lesson 19: The sun and the sea make everybody happy.
Lesson 20: Happiness is a certain way of seeing things.
Lesson 21: Rivalry poisons happiness.
Lesson 22: Women care more than men about making others happy.
Lesson 23: Happiness means making sure that those around you are happy?

"The most important lessons for me from this list are Lesson 3, Lesson 7, Lesson 8, Lesson 13, Lesson 17."    
   
   I'm not really sure how much literary value this novel contains, but I am certain that this book carries much more human values and analysis of human emotions, which basically motivate literature and its core values, than most other works of literature. Being happy has been one of the most basic yet difficult task and desire for every human being on this world. Everyday people find and follow their own ways to gather sources leading to(or at least they think they do) their happiness. And many times, people fail to do so and some of them even lose the motivation for their lives. These struggles have always been good topics for literature for centuries. Ancient epics deal with unhappy heroes and kings finding their ways to defeat the sources of unhappiness, Shakespearean tragic heroes try to solve their unhappiness by sour vengeance, and the modern novels allure their readers by throwing pieces of "happily ever after" kind of phrases.

    Somehow I find it interesting we define every human emotion caused by good things "happiness." For instance, a feeling caused by tasting a perfectly cooked juicy rib-eye steak and a feeling after getting an A on a physics test are both called "happiness." And it makes sense we are so hung up to making ourselves happy because we only want good things to happen in our lives. And in my understanding, literature has depicted human agonies when not always good things happen. This universal theme of literature is the inevitable variables in our lives. And literature often experiments human characters in extreme environments to test how those variables affect our lives. In mathematics, you need the same number(or more) of equations to the number of variables in order to figure out the whole equation. If the variables are the keys to happiness, the equations are our struggles to become happy. However, unfortunately, because there are infinitely large amount of variables, it will be impossible to find the wholistic equation for the human happiness, but the good thing is there are infinite ways we can struggle to be happy and the literature will always experiment and reflect the results of hypotheses regarding the universal emotion.

Literary Journal #13 - Robinson Crusoe

For a long period of time (by "long," I'm talking about years), I imagined myself living alone on an abandoned island in the middle of the pacific ocean. I cannot deny one of the reasons I had that fantasy was watching a movie called "Cast Away." For those of you who've never heard of it, it is a movie where a Fedex employee gets into a plane crash and lands on an uninhabited island. I, strangely, felt bad when the character escapes the island at the end of the movie. All he faces are sad news left by his beloved ones. I actually didn't even understand why he tried to escape the island. Of course, he would have missed his family and friends, and even any other human being. But wasn't he at least free from everything he didn't want to deal with in the bigger society?

Anyway, I find a lot of similarities between Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe and the movie "Cast Away." Since most people know the plot of the book, I would rather focus talking about the themes and motifs than summarizing the story.

Well, John Donne said no man is an island, and I'm quite sure the intended theme of this book is not too far from that. But is it really? During his stay on the island, Crusoe found his faith in God and became very religious. People might say that's because he had nothing to rely on and was afraid of the wild and dangerous environment he was surrounded by, but couldn't it be because Crusoe really had time to think about himself and the reality of the world while separated from the human society? Living in the modern world, where everyone checks their friends Facebook status every 15 minutes on iphone and watches movies on Netflix instead of going to the theatre, I often feel blinded. Yes, the human society and the technology has given me better chances to succeed in whatever I have been doing and make my life easier, but sometimes I feel like most people forget about the essence of human life and nature. Although humans are so-called "social animals" who make connections with other humans for many different reasons, but life is a solitary action which lasts from the birth of a human being to his/her death. And often most of us forget to look for the reason of our existence but rather try to interpret the result of our existence. In that sense, Robinson Crusoe, who -though it was not intended, saved his own life and pulled out what is deep inside of his human nature- is a true hero for me.