Beware of Arriving
It’s Christmas 2021. The world is still engulfed in a ‘global pandemic’ caused by a peculiar virus, the origin of which remains a mystery. My own family in Xi’an, China were just entering another strict lockdown. Our trip to my partner Daniel’s family in Scotland was cancelled. He has caught a chill and is sleeping a lot. It’s grey and wet most days and our flat is very quiet. The whole scene is very unholidaylike. After the initial disappointment of having to face a bit of a shitty Christmas, I decided to accept it and utilise this time of completely no need to be anywhere, see anyone or do anything to do some reading. That’s when I came across this gem, Paul Watzlawick’s book ‘The Situation Is Hopeless But Not Serious’. It is a small book consisting of 14 short essays, very easy to read, yet one of the most entertaining and thought-provoking book I’ve read for a long while.
It is a clever book, and a very funny book, full of metaphors, vignettes, innuendos and irony, which probably connected with me particularly given the gloom I was going through as described above. However don’t be fooled by its seeming light-heartedness. Behind every laughter there is a moment of sobering ponderation. Truth, often imparted with unbearable honesty. I find myself go back and savour the words for longer…
Here I’d like to some parts from Chapter Eight - Beware of Arriving (background note: this book is intended as a manual for the pursuit of unhappiness)
“It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive, says the wisdom of a Japanese proverb.
Oscar Wilde comes to mind with his famous and often plagiarized aphorism: There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire; the other is to get it.
Arriving - by which is meant either literally or metaphorically reaching a destination - is generally taken to be an important criterion of success, power, recognition, and self-esteem. By the same token, failure or, especially, indolent drifting is considered a sign of stupidity, laziness, irresponsibility, or cowardice. ness, irresponsibility, or cowardice. But the road to success is troublesome, for it requires a great deal of effort and even the most intense effort may still fail. And who wants to go to this trouble? Thus instead of engaging in a “policy of small steps” toward a reasonable, reachable achievement, it is very useful to set oneself a goal that is admirably lofty. The advantages of this strategy should be immediately obvious to my readers. The Faustian striving for knowledge and mastery, the quest for the Blue Flower, the ascetic renunciation of life’s lower satisfactions, this carries a high degree of social approval and your mother’s admiration). And above all, if the goal is that high and distant, even the most stupid among us will understand that the road to that goal will be long and cumbersome, and that the travel will require extensive and time-consuming preparations. Therefore, who dares to blame us if we have not yet gotten started or if, once on our way, we get lost, march around in circles, or sit down for lengthy rests? If anything, history and literature are full of heroic examples of seekers who got lost in some labyrinth or tragically failed in the performance of some superhuman task, and who enable us lesser seekers to profit from their fateful glory.
Yet this is not the whole story. Even the arrival at the most sublime goal is fraught with a special danger, the common denominator of the quotations at the beginning of this chapter, namely, the disenchantment of successful arriving. The talented unhappiness expert knows of this danger, consciously or unconsciously. It would appear that the creator of our world has ordained the unattained goal to be so much more desirable, romantic and ecstatic than it turns out to be when we get there. Let’s not fool ourselves: The honeymoon prematurely loses its sweetness; upon arrival in the distant, exotic city the taxi driver tries to cheat us; the fully accomplished final examination creates little more than a host of additional, unexpected complications and responsibilities; and the alleged serenity of life after retirement is not half as ideal as it is made out to be.
Nonsense, the more sanguine types among us will say: Whoever is willing to settle for such mild, anaemic ideals deserves to find himself empty-handed in the end. What, instead of the passionate affect that exceeds itself in the climax of its gratification? Or the holy rage that leads ty the intoxicating act of revenge for injuries suffered and to the restoration of universal justice? Who in the face of these gratifications could still speak of the “disenchantment” of arriving?
Unfortunately it does not quite seem to work out that way. And those who are not yet convinced should read what George Orwell has to say in his essay Revenge Is Sour. True, % contains some considerations of such profound decency and conciliatory wisdom that they are actually out of place in a manual for the pursuit of unhappiness. But I hope my readers will forgive me for quoting them all the same, if only because they are so pertinent to our topic.
In 1945, in his capacity of war correspondent, Orwell visited a prisoner-of-war camp in South Germany. He was shown around by a young Viennese Jew who was in charge of interrogations. As they came to a special section where high-ranking SS officers were detained, the young man delivered a fearful kick with his heavy army boot to the grotesquely swollen foot of one of the prisoners. The German officer had held a post corresponding to a general in the political branch of the SS.
It could be taken as quite certain that he had had charge of concentration camps and had presided over tortures and hangings. In short, he represented everything that we had been fighting against during the past five years... .
It is absurd to blame any German or Austrian jew for getting his own back at the Nazis. Heaven knows what scores this particular man may have had to wipe out; very likely his whole family had been murdered; and, after all, even a wanton kick to a prisoner is a very tiny thing compared with the outrages committed by the Hitler régime. But what this scene, and much else that I saw in Germany, brought home to me was that the whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
Who would not have jumped for joy, in 1940, at the thought of seeing SS officers kicked and humiliated? But when the thing becomes possible, it is merely pathetic and disgusting.
And then, in the same essay, Orwell tells how a few hours after the fall of Stuttgart he and a Belgian war correspondent entered the city. The Belgian—and who could blame him?--was even more anti-German than the avers’! Englishman or American.
We had to enter by a small footbridge which the C mans had evidently made efforts to defend. A dead German soldier was lying supine at the foot of the steps. His face was a waxy yellow….
The Belgian averted his face as we went past. When we were well over the bridge he confided to me that this was the first time that he had seen a dead man. I suppose he was thirty-five years old, and for four years he had been doing war propaganda over the radio.
This one “arrival’’ becomes a decisive experience for the Belgian. It completely changes his attitude toward the “Boches”:
When he left, he gave the residue of the coffee we had brought with us to the Germans on whom we were billeted. A week earlier he would probably have been scandalised at the idea of giving coffee to a “Boche.” But his feelings, he told me, had undergone a change at the sight of “ce pauvre mort’ beside the bridge: it had suddenly brought home to him the meaning of war. And yet, if we had happened to enter the town by another route, he might have been spared the experience of seeing even one corpse out of the—perhaps—twenty million that the war had produced.
But back to our real subject. If not even revenge is sweet, how much less sweetness is there in arriving at a supposedly happy goal? Therefore: Beware of arriving. (And, incidentally, why did Sir Thomas More call that distant island of happiness Utopia, that is, Nowhere?)
