Book Reviews: Aggressively Happy; Orwell's Roses
Aggressively Happy: A Realist’s Guide to Believing in the Goodness of Life by Joy Marie Clarkson (Bethany House, 2022)
The current moment feels like a very strange time to be talking about being aggressively happy, but Joy Marie Clarkson takes that into account—after all, she wrote her book during the height of the pandemic. The kind of happiness she’s talking about is the kind "that can stand tall, look life in the eye, and smile anyway,” that “takes grit, determination, and a good sense of humor.” Happiness, she agrees with the rest of us, is not easy to achieve in a world full of war and disease and famine and so many other terrible things—but, she argues, it’s “well worth the fight.”
Once that’s established, the rest of her book eloquently explains how to fight for it. Chapter after chapter offers canny strategies, some of them counterintuitive (“Befriend sadness”), some of them very counterintuitive (“Expect the end of the world”). However unexpected, her arguments are thought-provoking, refreshing, and occasionally even tear-inducing.
It’s been a while since I read a chapter that delighted me as much as “Enjoy things unironically.” It’s one of those chapters that makes you want to dog-ear every page and highlight every sentence, such as these: “A happiness built on the fragile foundation of other people’s opinions about us is one bound to fail. Unabashedly liking something, and even admitting you like it, is a small practice in being who you are and offering it to others as a gift.”
On the other hand, it must be said that rarely have I read a chapter that made me raise a skeptical eyebrow quite as often as “Be like Mr. Collins.”* Yes, that Mr. Collins, the unctuous clergymen from Pride and Prejudice who runs around proposing until someone finally says yes. Now, I’ve insisted on the potential for good in a lot of widely disliked fictional men, from Logan on “Gilmore Girls” to Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, but Mr. Collins, even for me, is a bridge too far. I could not get on board with Clarkson’s argument that he’s a wonderful example of godly contentedness. However, I give her credit for trying (any Team Logan member can sympathize with this kind of uphill battle).
And, on a larger scale, I deeply appreciate this book that wisely and stubbornly contends that happiness is worth pursuing, for the sake of others as well as for our own sake. It’s a source of spiritual, emotional, and mental nourishment, coming at a time when we all very much need it.
*Who am I kidding, I can’t raise one eyebrow. I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t. It was two eyebrows.
(Thanks to Bethany House for the review copy.)
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (Viking, 2021)
To be perfectly honest, I was going to review Cloud Cuckoo Land in this space this week, but two things happened. Number one, I didn’t finish it in time, and number two—well, Ukraine happened. And I had this library book about George Orwell sitting on the shelf, and it suddenly struck me that now might be a good time to take a look at it.
Orwell, of course, knew something of war, and of the importance of practicing discernment and integrity even when caught up in war’s frenzy. Rebecca Solnit makes the case that he also understood the need to hold on to beauty and to nature. When Solnit visited Orwell’s old home in Hertfordshire and saw rosebushes that might have been planted by him (or might have just been descendants of rosebushes that he planted), they raised “questions about who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, perhaps of anyone, who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
It turns out that those roses—the planting and tending of which Orwell meticulously documented in his diaries—have quite a lot to say. Solnit suggests that Orwell’s work with plants and animals in his Hertfordshire home helped keep him grounded in crucial ways. At the same time, she acknowledges that a yen for nature is hardly enough to keep a person from going bad. She contrasts Orwell’s story with that of Tina Modotti, who went from being a great photographer of roses to a dedicated servant of the murderous Stalin regime. And even Stalin himself, Solnit points out, planted lemon trees.
So a love of nature isn’t necessarily enough by itself to keep one on the right road—but it gives one something important to value and to work for, especially when approached as something to be respected and not dominated. And that matters.
Exploring what exactly nature does give us takes Solnit on a long journey, from civil war Spain to Stalinist Russia to 18th-century England to 20th-century Antigua and beyond. In fact, she rambles as much as one of the roses of her title, always circling back to Orwell eventually, but on the way studying the many cultural and ideological implications of roses and other aspects of nature. I admit that it’s hard to keep up sometimes (especially when the author has a bit of a weakness for fragmented and convoluted sentences). But ultimately, there’s merit in her argument that nature, and his attitude towards it, did something to help Orwell resist the pull of authoritarianism when so many leftists of his generation got sucked in. If we might not have the Orwell we know without roses, then that’s one more reason to be grateful for roses.
(Cover images copyright Bethany House and Viking, respectively.)
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