Human dimensions
Saturday, 14th May 2011
For some people, poor souls, freedom from anxiety is the highest happiness.
Much better if Malouf had stuck with the classical world he knows so well. He could have acknowledged that, in every human age, seekers and thinkers describe ways of life, and know them to be paths to eudaimonia — flourishing.
In fact, he should have allowed that one can be emotionally nonplussed and still happy. ‘Do I feel happy’ is not, after all, the pressing point. The more sober question must be: ‘Am I reaching my potential?’ As a father, brother, mother, Prime Minister — do I make the cut?
By such enduring lights, we can see that Sisyphus is not flourishing, then, and that Shukov is unhappy too. They suffer from flourishing withheld, a specifically inhuman punishment, visited by fickle deity and pitiless Stalinism.
That he ultimately sees happiness and humanity in Shukov’s condition is ironic, then, and poetic; owing more perhaps to the beauty of Malouf’s prose than the otherwise careful thinking he has done about a most pressing matter.
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