Over the Edge - November 2

a&e ii

HUMAN HAPPINESS

Brian Fawcett Review

PAUL STRICKLAND
CONTRIBUTOR

In his most recent book, Brian Fawcett explores
the sources of lasting happiness and challenges
the images of uncomplicated stability among
suburban families in the late 1940s, the 1950s
and the early 1960s. Fawcett left Prince George
in 1966 to attend the new Simon Fraser Uni-
versity. In the Lower Mainland he was a poet,
urban planner and an English teacher to prison
inmates, and later a Globe and Mail columnist
and an author of many books. He moved to To-
ronto in the 1990s, where he continues his work
as a freelance writer. Some of his best-known
books are Cambodia: A Book for People Who
Find Television Too Slow (1986); Public Eye:
An Investigation Into the Disappearance of the
World (1989); Gender Wars: A Novel and Some
Conversation about Sex and Gender (1993); and
Virtual Clearcut, or the Way Things Are in My
Hometown (2003). In Virtual Clearcut, which
won the Pearson Prize, Fawcett records his im-
pressions and also conversations with friends
during several return visits to Prince George and
district since the mid-1980s. He puts them in the
context of globalization and increasing corpor-
ate concentration and their tendency to margin-
alize regional centres like this community. Faw-
cett has given readings and lectures at UNBC.

In Human Happiness, Fawcett writes he is
in part motivated by the desire to find more evi-
dence for “the goodness of the human spirit.”
The most important thing is “not the will to
dominate others, or make life about ourselves,
but the often-interrupted will to love and be
loved, and the contagious decency that arises
from it.

“My private motives?’” he continues. “Like
most people born in North America during and
just after the Second World War, I grew up with-
out the faintest curiosity about the people who’d
brought me into the world, and even less about
the ancestors who had gotten them to our staging
grounds. Towards the end of my parents’ lives I
began to understand that this lack of curiosity
was a serious mistake, and in part, this book is
my attempt at restitution: this is about them, but
it is also for them.”

Fawcett colourfully describes and draws pro-
found philosophical lessons from the lives, the
serious illnesses and the final days of his uncle,
Ronald Surry; his father, Hartley Fawcett; and
his mother, Rita Joan Fawcett (nee Surry). He
does not hold anything back. He brings to bear
on the topic the best skills of a good journalist
and historian, even in interviews with his aging
parents in the 1990s about his family’s origins
and values. He delves into issues of family
background, secrets and skeletons in closets that
I would have found impossible to take up if I
had ever attempted such a project -- beyond a
short autobiographical essay -- with my own
parents and relatives. However, he does this
very professionally and draws insights that we
can all keep in mind as we deal with the inevit-
able deaths of parents, grandparents and other
relatives of the previous generation to whom we
are close.

He relates in moving terms the painful death
of his mother from the after-effects of a stroke.
He believes the pain was unnecessarily pro-
longed and worsened by medical interventions
made possible by advancing technology. He
sees an unholy alliance of fundamentalism and
sophisticated corporate technology in many hos-

pitals. “Few of us understand what this alliance
does on a daily basis,” he observes. “But when
you spend two weeks in a hospital watching it
torture an innocent woman who happens to be
your mother, you see it in a new way. It is not
benign, not civilized. It is a new kind of barbar-
ism.”

Fawcett argues a very convincing case against
using medical technology to needlessly prolong
life for the hopelessly, terminally ill. No one
wants to see a repetition of the Terry Schiavo
fiasco in the United States last decade. However,

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there do need to be protections against, in a few
cases, situations where the elderly person wants
to go on living but some relatives would sooner
see him or her pass away quickly for personal
reasons. In that case, perhaps a previously un-
should
examine the patient’s case. Too many times a

involved, out-of-district committee
“Do Not Resuscitate” order is over-interpreted
to mean “Do Not Treat.”

Fawcett’s mother died in December 2000
at the age of 90. His father died in December

2008 just short of his 101st birthday. They had

had a sometimes rocky relationship, but, in part
because of observance of convention and in part
because of his mother’s determination to ob-
serve the marriage contract, they stayed together
until the end of her life. “Despite their war with
one another, both of them were happy in the
world as it presented itself,” he says. “That their
boat had no motor and was ultimately to go over
the great Cosmic Waterfall is merely existential
slapstick: the human condition.”

A tumble down a steep waterfall is Faw-
cett’s metaphor for death. “We can’t just take

the world as it comes: we’ve got to try to repair
it... . We have to push and shove and do what
we can, even though we’re all eventually going
headfirst into the big wall, slapstick style or over
the Cosmic Waterfall.”

Fawcett’s reflections on his parents’ lives
and background are also an opportunity for him
to discuss how values and expectations have
changed since the end of the Second World War
in 1945. “When Hartley Fawcett and Rita Surry
were young, happiness was a noble pursuit, one
that, in their minds, led without ambivalence

to ‘the Good Life’. But somewhere in the last
half century, ‘the Good Life’ has lost its defin-
ite article. Today one can lead a good life, and
that has become an ideological, censorious, and
antihumanist term, one that can be experienced
only individually. Not sure what I’m taking
about?”

Fawcett goes on to describe the likely re-
sults, in our now very fractious society, of a pub-
lic discussion of how to strive toward common
goals in providing the Good Life for everyone:

“Try to imagine a group of people gathering
on a contemporary North American or European
civic space to celebrate the joys and achieve-
ments of humanity. First of all, it isn’t going to
happen. If it did, it would draw a hostile counter-
demonstration: animal rights activists who’d
argue that we’re mistreating every other species;
environmentalists, most of whom see human
beings as a terrible scourge on everything else
on the planet, would join in, followed by anti-
racists hollering that all this fun is coming at
the expense of the underdeveloped nations and
people of colour, wherever they’re living; sup-
porters of NGOs dedicated to wiping out disease
and poverty in the underdeveloped world would
join in, bickering at the celebrants for not doing
enough, not doing more.”

The burden of the memory of the last cen-
tury’s great atrocities continues to weigh on us
in our faltering attempts to find happiness.

“Look at it this way: the three most influential
public figures of the twentieth century, Adolph
Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong, ordered
-- sometimes directly -- the deaths of about 35
million people, and were indirectly responsible
for 40 or 50 million more. No instrument can ac-
curately calculate the pain and misery that these
and a depressingly long list of other ‘exemplary’
people have spread, and no language can articu-
late the affront to life itself those wasted or pre-
maturely terminated lives constitute.”

It is difficult, if not impossible, then, to be
unfailingly optimistic. “We live, instead, from
private gratifications to small pleasures, and we
try not to make the world worse than it has be-
come,” Fawcett says.

Happiness “is intangible and limited, a
fleetingly experienced emotional evanescence
lodged within a continuum of other, not-neces-
sarily-sanguine events,” he contends. “It moves
and shifts within the currents of everything else,
always elusive, rarely surfacing in the same way
or in the same configuration.”

Human Happiness is a powerful book with
implications for philosophy, medical ethics and
sociology. Without preaching, it throws light,
without any direct intention to do so, on the topic
of the duties of sons and daughters toward aging
parents in failing health. It is, in addition, a way
to contemplate what constitutes a meaningful
life. It’s also a way to prepare for the impacts of
a death in the family and what issues can arise
afterwards. I highly recommend it.

Brian Fawcett. Human Happiness. To-
ronto: Thomas Allen Publishers, 2011.
260 pages. Softcover. $24.95