Author: Andrew Sullivan

“There must be a time of day when the man who makes plans forgets his plans, and acts as if he had no plans at all.

There must be a time of day when the man who has to speak falls very silent. And his mind forms no more propositions, and he asks himself: Did they have a meaning?

There must be a time when the man of prayer goes to pray as if it were the first time in his life he had ever prayed; when the man of resolutions puts his resolutions aside as if they had all been broken, and he learns a different wisdom: distinguishing the sun from the moon, the stars from the darkness, the sea from the dry land, and the night sky from the shoulder of a hill,” – Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island.

That’s the title of a brief, brilliant documentary (above) by Oscar winners TJ Martin and Dan Lindsay. Paul Rosenfeld captions the film:

With simplicity and depth directors TJ Martin and Dan Lindsay bring us an emotionally charged documentary about family and the pains of old age. The film revolves around an audio conversation between Martin’s grandfather and grandmother, who was dying of cancer at the time. Featured alongside a selection of home videos and photos, the conversation is a portrait of the life the couple lived. But more than a simple celebration of those moments, the film challenges the viewer to grapple with the highs and lows of life, including age, decay, and death.

In an interview last February, Lindsay described the short film’s origins:

My filmmaking partner, TJ Martin, filmed a conversation between his grandfather and his grandmother almost a month before she passed away. She was dying of cancer, and her husband is reminiscing about their life, and she’s having a hard time remembering things. It just happened that they filmed a lot of footage of themselves and had a lot of great photographs, so one day we thought it would be interesting to take that conversation and tie in the idea of what memory means to identity.

Pedro Blas Gonzalez plumbs the differences between happiness and joy:

While happiness is an outward expression of gratifying experiences, a moment of levity in life’s stages, joy is like smiling privately. Happiness is often attained from outside ourselves; joy takes the form of inner peace. Like fuel that feeds an engine, happiness propels us through the world of other people, things, and events without calling attention to itself. Happiness that is not self-conscious is more akin to joy than our popular conception of happiness. We can reflect on our state of being happy and cherish it, while not commanding it. However, more often than not, happiness is only noticed when it is lacking in our lives. This is the point when we realize that happiness has evaded us. …

One reason that happiness is often fleeting is because it attempts to take root in what can be described as moving targets. Happiness is the temporary culmination of emotional fulfillment. This makes our emotional and spiritual well-being transparent. Often it is during the noticeable absence of happiness in our lives, when we have become consumed by the idea of trying to attain happiness, that we realize how fleeting happiness truly is. We cannot cultivate the search for happiness, as we can joy.

Update from a reader:

Your excerpt from Pedro Blas Gonzalez left me feeling confused, because I thought he had it exactly backwards.

To me, happiness is a state better than contentment, in which I am pleased with my life in general. I considered myself a happy person for most of my life until my husband died at age 59; after that I was not happy very often. Even so, before and after his death I had moments of joy. Joy to me is an experience of exalted happiness, where the uplift of the moment, whether found in a transcendent view, inspiring music, intense pleasure, spiritual revelation, intellectual discovery, or some other personal experience, raises me above whatever ordinary feelings I have.

If Gonzalez is looking for a word, I would suggest the word “gladness” as used in some versions of the Bible, instead of the word joy as defined in his essay. Particularly in the spiritual sense, a feeling of gladness can underlay happiness and contribute to moments of joy. He might also wish to explore the various uses of the word mindfulness in contemporary culture.

Gonzalez complains that happiness is now a buzzword “equated today with the attainment of pleasure,” and his discussion of joy seems to ignore common definitions of the word. What I concluded is that in this essay, Gonzalez decides to reject the popular understanding of a vocabulary word and assert his superior ability to define it, in the process inverting the usual understanding of the definitions of “joy” and “happiness.” I would be more impressed with his essay if he didn’t try redefining words that have achieved an agreed-upon definition among the masses of English speakers. He may be writing perfectly good philosophy, but his redefinitions are yet another attempt, in the view of this experienced editor and follower of linguistics and Language Log, of an unscientific attempt to create rules for English that don’t exist.

Natalie Wolchover profiles Jeremy England, a scientist who has developed “a new physics theory of life”:

From the standpoint of physics, there is one essential difference between living things and inanimate clumps of carbon atoms: The former tend to be much better at capturing energy from their environment and dissipating that energy as heat. Jeremy England, a 31-year-old assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has derived a mathematical formula that he believes explains this capacity. The formula, based on established physics, indicates that when a group of atoms is driven by an external source of energy (like the sun or chemical fuel) and surrounded by a heat bath (like the ocean or atmosphere), it will often gradually restructure itself in order to dissipate increasingly more energy. This could mean that under certain conditions, matter inexorably acquires the key physical attribute associated with life.

“You start with a random clump of atoms, and if you shine light on it for long enough, it should not be so surprising that you get a plant,” England said.

England’s theory is meant to underlie, rather than replace, Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection, which provides a powerful description of life at the level of genes and populations. “I am certainly not saying that Darwinian ideas are wrong,” he explained. “On the contrary, I am just saying that from the perspective of the physics, you might call Darwinian evolution a special case of a more general phenomenon.”

(Hat tip: 3QD)

A study indicates that “simply living in an area with a large concentration of conservative Protestants increases the chances of divorce, even for those who are not themselves conservative Protestants”:

According to researchers who took into account race, income and other factors, marriage and fertility trends that are common among conservative Protestants — younger marriage, more kids, less higher education — affect all people in areas most populated by conservative Protestants, no matter their personal religious affiliation.

“Conservative Protestant community norms and the institutions they create seem to increase divorce risk,” researchers say in the study. For example, those who are struggling in their marriage may feel discouraged to find help in communities where marriage is idealized or marital failure is viewed as shameful, the researchers suggest.

George Chidi adds:

The strongest correlation showed that early marriage and low income among religious conservatives factor into the higher divorce rates. “Unpacking these variations, [demographers Jennifer] Glass and [Philip] Levchak found that the high divorce rate among conservative religious groups is indeed explained in large part by the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes of conservative Protestant youth,” the authors wrote.