Dawn's Reading Blog

I first read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in high school. Ivan Denisovich is in a Russian gulag and his day starts badly. It’s minus 17 degrees out, he doesn’t feel well, and while he’s lying in his freezing bunk wondering if he should report in sick, he gets busted for malingering and sentenced to a few days in lock-up. The amazing thing about this book–what struck me in high school–is that it’s a happy story. By the end of the book, Ivan has had a good day. It’s not what you or I would call a good day–the goodness consisting of such triumphs as scoring two bowls of gruel and not getting locked up after all–but it’s what he would call a good day. And he does.

Even in high school I could sense the fundamental truth of this novel–that people adjust to their circumstances; that no matter how negative or positive the circumstances we find ourselves in are, we all have good days and bad days. And they all feel about the same. That is, a good day in a gulag can make you about as happy as a good day on Park Avenue, and when Paris Hilton (I’d have said Athena Onassis back then) gets dumped, she feels every bit as bad I do.

I read One Day as part of a class called Utopia and Distopia. For the mid-term, we were asked to create our own Utopia. Mine was called Tnedicca Gnidnatsthiw (pronounced T-ned-i-ca Nid-nat-shoe) which was “withstanding accident” backwards. In my Utopia, people were taught how to be happy: how to take pleasure from simple things like a sunny day or the taste of an apple, or how to get up and do something rather than dwelling on burdensome thoughts. People in my Utopia were happy not because life was so very perfect but because they made the choice to be happy. I didn’t know it, but I’d independently discovered mindfulness.

Ironically, in my final paper for that class I went quite the opposite direction. By then I’d read enough of books like Walden II and Looking Backward to know that if there was one place I’d never want to live, it was in a Utopia. They were all ghastly–passionless, humorless, antiseptic. In a word: dull. Instead I created a world embarrassingly close to the one John Norman wrote about in his Gor series. This was a world where people had to fight just to stay alive. The theory being that you never appreciate life so much as when you’re on the verge of losing it. In between fights, they had a lot of sex and ate with their hands and were generally happy barbarians. The theory being that sex is good. I mean, the theory being that we are first and foremost sensual beings.

I made a decision that term, whether consciously or not, to take the mountainous path. Highs, I argued, necessitate lows. Creativity requires madness. Pleasure is more than an absence of pain. I’ll take the bad to feel the good. Don’t numb me. Unfortunately, whether we choose it or not, life is largely a series of slight bumps, made mountainous only through over-dramatic mental renderings, separated by long stretches of the experiential version of Kansan wheat fields. It wasn’t the peaks and troughs that got me so much as the spaces in between. I thought: I could be happy if only it weren’t for laundry; if only relationships were new forever and Monday didn’t always follow Sunday, and every night was opening night.

A long time of stumbling through life waiting for it to get perfect later, I re-discovered the concept of mindfulness through Buddhism. And a few days ago, tired of reading non-fiction and longing for a pick-me-up, I re-discovered Ivan Denisovich. Who knew Ivan Denisovich was a Zen Buddhist? In the midst of a prison camp, on a sub-zero day spent mostly outside, Ivan can relish a piece of potato in his soup. He can feel the rush of the tobacco he’s smoking, the warmth of the stove he has five minutes in front of, the familiar heft of his cherished spoon. When Ivan gets something, he’s grateful. And when he has something, he’s generous. When he runs into a difficulty, it’s easily forgotten, and when he’s working, he throws himself into the artful joy of it. Ivan knows that as his squad goes, so he goes, and he doesn’t ask for packages from home because he places no more value on his own hunger than on his family’s. He wastes little energy thinking of what will happen in two years when his sentence is up, realizing it might be better or it might not, and he doesn’t mourn his past. Maybe the less restrictive camp he used to be in was better in some ways, but not in all ways. Ivan is here, now.

Modern studies reported online and in books like Stumbling on Happiness confirm what I knew to be true in high school but subsequently lost sight of: circumstances don’t make happiness. Money only adds happiness up to the poverty level, and even that difference is less than you’d imagine. What adds happiness are positive actions and attitudes like: gratitude, generosity, letting go of minor irritations and disappointments, connecting to each other, and deflating our own sense of self-importance. And, of course, sex.

Zen Buddhist or mad genius? Flow or spike? Ecstatic or content? A lot of cliffs and chasms later, I’m aiming for content. If Ivan can get there, so can I.