Midrash on Happiness [by Grace Paley]

Last week, my sister Amy and I visited the Grounds for Sculpture in Hamilton, NJ. It is a magical place, founded by Seward Johnson on 42 landscaped acres dotted with sculptures that give new meaning to the phrase “Larger than Life.” As we strolled the grounds, we came upon the sculpture pictured below. Grace Paley’s “Midrash on Happiness” immediately came to mind. I heard Grace Paley herself read “Midrash on Happiness” at an event in Albany, NY. Now, whenever I read it, I have Paley’s voice, with it’s strong Brooklyn accent, in my head. You can listen to Eve Ensler read the piece by following the link below the text. [sdl]

What she meant by happiness, she said, was the following: she meant having (or having had) (or continuing to have) everything. By everything, she meant, first, the children, then a dear person to live with, preferably a man, but not necessarily, (by live with, she meant for a long time but not necessarily). Along with and not in preferential order, she required three or four best women friends to whom she could tell every personal fact and then discuss on the widest deepest and most hopeless level, the economy, the constant, unbeatable, cruel war economy, the slavery of the American worker to the idea of that economy, the complicity of male people in the whole structure, the dumbness of men (including her preferred man) on this subject. By dumbness, she meant everything dumbness has always meant: silence and stupidity. By silence she meant refusal to speak; by stupidity she meant refusal to hear. For happiness she required women to walk with. To walk in the city arm in arm with a woman friend (as her mother had with aunts and cousins so many years ago) was just plain essential. Oh! those long walks and intimate talks, better than standing alone on the most admirable mountain or in the handsomest forest or hay-blown field (all of which were certainly splendid occupations for the windstarved soul). More important even (though maybe less sweet because of age) than the old walks with boys she’d walked with as a girl, that nice bunch of worried left-wing boys who flew (always slightly handicapped by that idealistic wing) into a dream of paid-up mortgages with a small room for opinion and solitude in the corner of home.

Oh do you remember those fellows, Ruthy?

Remember? Well, I’m married to one.

But she had, Faith continued, democratically tried walking in the beloved city with a man, but the effort had failed since from about that age-twenty-seven or eight-he had felt an obligation, if a young woman passed, to turn abstractedly away, in the middle of the most personal conversation or even to say confidentially, wasn’t she something?-or clasping his plaid shirt, at the heart’s level, oh my god! The purpose of this: perhaps to work a nice quiet appreciation into thunderous heartbeat as he had been taught on pain of sexual death. For happiness, she also required work to do in this world and bread on the table. By work to do she included the important work of raising children righteously up. By righteously she meant that along with being useful and speaking truth to the community, they must do no harm. By harm she meant not only personal injury to the friend the lover the coworker the parent (the city the nation) but also the stranger; she meant particularly the stranger in all her or his difference, who, because we were strangers in Egypt, deserves special goodness for life or at least until the end of strangeness. By bread on the table, she meant no metaphor but truly bread as her father had ended every single meal with a hunk of bread. By hunk, she was describing one of the attributes of good bread.

Suddenly she felt she had left out a couple of things: Love. Oh yes, she said, for she was talking, talking all this time, to patient Ruth and they were walking for some reason in a neighborhood where she didn’t know the children, the pizza places or the vegetable markets. It was early evening and she could see lovers walking along Riverside Park with their arms around one another, turning away from the sun which now sets among the new apartment houses of New Jersey, to kiss. Oh I forgot, she said, now that I notice, Ruthy I think I would die without love. By love she probably meant she would die without being in love. By in love she meant the acuteness of the heart at the sudden sight of a particular person or the way over a couple of years of interested friendship one is suddenly dunned by the lungs’ longing for more and more breath in the presence of that friend, or nearly drowned to the knees by the salty spring that seems to beat for years on our vaginal shores. Not to omit all sorts of imaginings which assure great spiritual energy for months and when luck follows truth, years.

Oh sure, love. I think so too, sometimes, said Ruth, willing to hear Faith out since she had been watching the kissers too, but I’m really not so sure. Nowadays it seems like pride, I mean overweening pride, when you look at the children and think we don’t have time to do much (by time Ruth meant both her personal time and the planet’s time). When I read the papers and hear all this boom boom bellicosity, the guys out-daring each other, I see we have to change it all – the world – without killing it absolutely – without killing it, that’ll be the trick the kids’ll have to figure out. Until that begins, I don’t understand happiness – what you mean by it.

Then Faith was ashamed to have wanted so much and so little all at the same time – to be so easily and personally satisfied in this terrible place, when everywhere vast public suffering rose in reeling waves from the round earth’s nation-states – hung in the satellite-watched air and settled in no time at all inlo TV sets and newsrooms. It was all there. Look up and the news of halfway round the planet is falling on us all. So for all these conscientious and technical reasons, Faith was ashamed. It was clear that happiness could not be worthwhile, with so much conversation and so little revolutionary change. Of course, Faith said, I know all that. I do, but sometimes walking with a friend I forget the world.