The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner (Twelve paperback edition, 2009)
Reviewed by Cindi Di Marzo
“One always begins to forget a place as soon as it’s left behind,” according to Charles Dickens. The eminent Victorian filled his novels with characters who know their share of misery, much of it tied to the places in which they live. From the penny-pinching scrooge to Oliver’s fellows in the orphanage, Dickens pretty well covered the field of misery in Victorian London. It isn’t difficult to imagine that they would gladly leave it and memories of it behind. But some of Dickens’s most memorable characters rise above their conditions to embrace a happiness seldom traceable to a change in circumstances or amnesia; rather, it comes either from an intrinsically contented nature or a change of heart.
In The Geography of Bliss, National Public Radio commentator Eric Weiner discovers that, perhaps, Dickens might not have been as spot-on about memory as he was about humanity. Clearly, the places where Weiner traveled and lived as NPR foreign correspondent left a lasting impression and vast field of inquiry to explore: the potential for happiness in residents of markedly different countries.
Entwined as it is with political, economic, social, religious and philosophical systems and personal beliefs, happiness is a slippery concept. Weiner traveled to 10 countries to pin it down. Naturally, the first stop any self-respecting journalist would make is the Netherlands, home of the World Database of Happiness. Run by what Weiner the humorist describes as a “Dutch Robin Williams,” the WDH churns out statistics drawn from happiness studies. Here, Weiner learns important lessons. Joy does not result from seemingly unlimited freedom and the security promised by a socialist agenda. More disappointing to Weiner, happiness can be reduced to a number in a database. Fortunately, this somewhat discouraging beginning merely whets Weiner’s investigative instincts. In fact, it sets him and readers on a wild quest in search of bliss.
Early on, Weiner dispenses with simple solutions; gobs of money and air conditioning in Qatar do not produce happy citizens; an end to Soviet rule did not release Moldova from the doldrums; crippling cold and darkness cannot squelch Icelanders’ ability to find happiness in failure; and unparalleled levels of comfort and convenience do not appear to have aided Americans in their constitutionally granted pursuit of happiness. But there are some simple ingredients in the happiness recipe, commonly promoted by what he calls the “self-help industrial complex”: family, community, spirituality and trust. One less obvious influence, culture, turns out to be critical. For example, Weiner’s chapters on Qatar and Moldova suggest that lack or obliteration of a homogenous culture (or, in the cases of Qatar and America, a superficial culture) chips away at personal happiness. Regarding Iceland, Weiner says:
“Iceland–and this is the part that is truly mind-blowing–is inventing its culture now. As you read these words, some Icelandic musician is composing the quintessential Icelandic song. So far, no such thing exists. There is no tradition of instrumental music in Iceland. It was too cold and dark back then to bother, or maybe the ancient Icelanders were too drunk at the time. So young Islanders are deciding for themselves what is quintessentially Icelandic. It is a wonderful thing to watch. To be present at the moment of creation.”
By the time they reach these words, many readers will have begun to wonder where creativity figures in the happiness equation. Although Weiner does not expand upon creativity as typically conceived, in his chapter on Iceland, literally, he hits the tip of an iceberg. Icelanders’ love of their language is a major component of the glue that holds them together. It makes them a bunch of frequently intoxicated but nevertheless happy poets. Similarly, language in Thailand plays a role in that country’s buoyancy. The phrase mai pen rai (”it is nothing” or “never mind”) evokes a truth often spoken by Weiner’s happiest subjects; thinking registers as a serious threat to personal and collective joy. And like the Inuit, who use many terms for the word snow to convey subtle distinctions, the Thai language includes multiple phrases for the act of smiling. Self-professed Eeyore-ish Weiner’s favorite is yim mai awk (”I’m-trying-to-smile-but-can’t smile”). In Thailand, the language of smile is a complex window into the Thai character. Leaving Thailand at the start of a short-lived military coup, Weiner is convinced that the “don’t worry, be happy” philosophy will prevail.
It won’t take American readers long to understand that Weiner’s journey mirrors their own as citizens with a birthright of happiness. In order to achieve it, one must do as Weiner has done; define what it means to pursue happiness, as well as the state in which one qualifies as a happy person. Is it muddling through with a stiff upper lip, as do the Brits, never appearing weak or in need? Or is it giving up all desires, greed, envy and lust like buddhists in Bhutan, where the king has declared a policy of Gross National Happiness to counter the industrialized world’s fixation with Gross National Product? Weiner admits to sharing a commonly held view of the Himalayas as Shangri-La, derived from his reading of James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, well-known to high school and college students and fans of Frank Capra’s 1937 film adaptation. (A 1957 movie musical with Charles Boyer, John Gielgud and Liv Ullmann and 1956 musical comedy are other dramatizations.) A consideration of Hilton’s novel follows this review.
Weiner’s interviews with expatriates to Bhutan, a tiny country located high in the Himalayas between Tibet to the north and India to the south, confirm impressions from college days. One can be happy in an isolated oasis like Bhutan. Likewise, expatriates to the other visited countries weigh in on happiness quotients, the natives’ and their own. Contradictions abound, but in the remaining two destinations/chapters Weiner deftly pulls together his observations: India, a land founded on and completely comfortable with contradiction, and his homeland, America, where angst-ridden white male European philosophers and Freud have led generations to think as obsessively as they work.
The Geography of Bliss is just too good to miss. Weiner’s ironic, self-deprecating humor spices up ponder-ready wisdom and practical advice. As a road map of happiness, Weiner’s book is a trove of insights and tools to help readers unearth little gifts of joy wherever they live.
Happiness is Letting Go: Lost Horizon by James Hilton
Outwardly simple in plot and format, James Hilton’s now-classic view of a mountain-top Eden called Shangri-La ranks in many college students’ minds with Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha. Perhaps it is ironic that young adults who first read these books in high school and college are deeply affected by Hilton’s and Hesse’s novels, as they describe world-weary characters for whom spent youthful passions have left a void where wisdom might grow. This resonance suggests a human need, present even in those who have yet to revel in the world’s earthy delights, for stillness and refined beauty. In an age when recognition on the global stage requires being large, loud and ubiquitous, the definition of Art has become cloudier and more subjective than ever. For Hilton’s main character, 37-year-old English diplomat Robert “Glory” Conway, peace and stillness are pre-requisite for creation and preservation of genuine beauty. Between the two world wars, he and three companions are hijacked, or more accurately “spirited away,” from China to the mountains between northern India and Tibet. There, Conway discovers that the treacherous mountain landscape, lush valley and idyllic lamasery sheltering them discourage his typically half-hearted participation in modern life.
Dubbed a war hero, the well-educated Conway had taught at Oxford University and, in hindsight, believes that the quiet, scholarly life better suited his nature. Yet that, too, left him uneasy. Coming as it does between his return to England to become foreign secretary and his last assignment in China, evacuating nearly 100 Western residents of the Chinese city of Baskul during a revolution, the hijacking provides, Conway deems, a necessary interruption in his meaningless life. Within the walls of the lamasery, surrounded by beautiful objects and treated with highly cultivated, dispassionate courtesy, Conway finds a balm that begins to heal his wartime devastation.
Hilton bookends his fantastic tale with prologue and epilogue in the voice of the novel’s narrator, Woodford Green, who has met with a group of classmates from his Oxford days. Between these, Hilton places the bulk of his story as a manuscript written by one of Green’s Oxford chums, a novelist named Rutherford who found Conway recovering in a mission hospital at Chung-Kiang. The manuscript accounts for Conway’s disappearance after the evacuation, through his time at the lamasery, later discovery in Chung-Kiang and subsequent vanishing from a ship traveling from Japan to San Francisco.
The effect of the lamasery on Conway’s traveling companions amplifies the inclinations it reveals in him: A junior civil servant named Mallinson rages against his forced captivity in Eden; a jovial American businessman plans to enjoy the lamasery’s gracious hospitality for as long as possible; and a female missionary snatches at a chance to convert the inhabitants. Eventually, as the pulls of the modern world become a distant memory, the American and missionary envision remaining indefinitely, while Conway decides that this place, which cannot be located on a map and from which few have traveled to the outside, offers the only peace he will ever know. Hilton demonstrates just how easy it is for Conway to let go of his old life. As the days unwind more slowly, the urge to ”do” grows fainter.
The shocking revelations of the lamasery’s history and age of its residents vouchsafed to him alone by the High Lama merely confirm Conway’s own impressions; rather than fear Shangri-La’s isolation like Mallinson, or seek to breech it like the missionary, or take advantage of it like the American, Conway embraces it. Rutherford’s manuscript explains that:
“It was not so much any individual thing that attracted him as the gradual revelation of elegance, of modest and impeccable taste, of harmony so fragrant that it seemed to gratify the eye without arresting it. Only indeed by a conscious effort did he recall himself from the artist’s mood to the connoisseur’s, and then he recognized treasures that museums and millionaires alike would have bargained for, exquisite pearl blue Sung ceramics, paintings in tinted inks preserved for more than a thousand years, lacquers in which the cold and lovely detail of fairyland was not so much depicted as orchestrated.”
By this point, Conway understand that bargaining between museums and millionaires defiles art works; crude behaviors fueled by emotions and base desires threaten noble human dignity as exemplified by his elderly guide at the lamasery and a young, musically gifted woman, both aspirants to lamahood. Since it appeared, admiration for Hilton’s novel has led many people to ponder the location of his lost paradise; some have tried to reach it; and a few have made it a lifelong quest. Weiner may have come close when he landed in Bhutan. But it doesn’t matter whether or where Shangri-La exists, what happened to Conway after he disappeared for the second time, or if the high lama’s testimony to miraculous happenings in the Himalayas contains truth. Hilton grants us a vision of Art, Wisdom, Peace and Stillness set against the music of the spheres. This vision remains as water for the seeds of beauty inside us that grow just a little bit more each time we glimpse Eden.
