catalytic

It is a commonplace that it gets easier to be happier as one gets older, up to a point and barring afflictions.  And I find this is true.  I am as happy now as I was in college.  There, then, a correspondence of place and personality, of individual needs and communal abundance, made for a very rich situation.  I flourished, but under full sun, well watered and in ideal soil.  Happiness was nearly pushed on me in quantity then and there: it would have been hard not to be happy, and I didn't try.

And now?  I am as happy, but on far less.  I have become able to break down the components of rocky soil, and steal the nutrients that were locked up.  I take great pleasure in law, for example, and law is rocky soil - it has to be worked on before it opens up.

But you're married you say - isn't that a difference? Of course it is, and that is what I was heading towards.  Marriage is a mutual arrangement for deriving various goods - including happiness - from less than ideal circumstances.  Marriage, in other words, is not a raw input, but a mutual process by which two work upon and build from the raw materials of experience, of life.  We are not hydroponic tomatoes in a greenhouse with fertilized water dripping on us.*  We have to do the work of getting nutrition and living upon and producing from it.  Marriage is not the tree, or the forest, or the fruit: marriage is photosynthesis or digestion.  In this way, marriage is more nearly like one's productive reading and writing - it is not a thing so much as an ongoing parade of action, or if a thing, it is a route or - better - a facility considered together with its action.  Marriage, like a serious course of reading, is a faculty.

The happiness of age is the happiness of marriage is the happiness of - arrangement and matured digestive capacity at work.



* Well, some people - sufficiently wealthy Manhattanites and sufficiently ascetic nuns, for example - are pretty much hydroponic, and the results can be strangely good, just as hydroponic vegetables can be good.  But one does notice that the external system has taken over much of the internal work.