Isak stopped reading and set down his novel. Something Ivan said struck him with such honest brutality that he had to sit silent and reflect on it for a moment. During Ivan’s meeting with Alyosha in the Metropolis tavern, before Ivan narrates his now most-famous fable, he tells his younger brother: “I know that my youth will triumph over everything – every disillusionment, every disgust with life. I’ve asked myself many times whether there is in the world any despair that would overcome this frantic and perhaps unseemly thirst for life in me, and I’ve come to the conclusion that there isn’t, that is till I am thirty, and then I shall lose it to myself I fancy. Some driveling consumptive moralist – and poets especially – often call that thirst for life base. It is a feature of the Karamazovs it is true, that thirst for life regardless of everything; you have it no doubt too, but why is it base?”
The youthful and triumphant zest for life Isak already understood. But he had not previously associated aging (or despair as Ivan put it) with the notion that a thirst for life is unseemly. Given his own vintage, that revelatory idea was troubling. Age, Isak realized, does tend to do violence to one’s zeal for life, one’s outlook and disposition, and one’s sense of humor. It’s the inevitable and unavoidable progression of things. Refusal to succumb to that fate is ignoble.
Go gentle into that good night. Dylan Thomas would quibble with that sentiment. but he was an artist and a child. Good, sensible folks act their age and embrace their destiny. They become disciples of Lord Chesterfield who, in a letter to his illegitimate son Philip Stanhope cautioned, “Loud laughter is mirth of the mob, who are only pleased with silly things; for true Wit or good Sense never excited a laugh since the creation of the world. A man of parts and fashion is therefore often seen to smile but never heard to laugh.”
Thinking about that, Isak suddenly understood why he rarely saw those of his generation really laugh. They might chuckle or titter or snicker. Laughter’s equivalent of the golf clap. But they rarely permit themselves to roar uncontrollably with delight until tears stream down their cheeks. Even when life is objectively funny, displaying that side is unbecoming. Lord Chesterfield’s pursed lips told us so.
So do some religious sects which reinforce Lord Chesterfield’s rules of decorum by invoking God’s ostensible contempt for unseemly silliness and light-mindedness. Beyond control, the temporal objective is not immediately clear, but the stated rational is that frivolity leads to lustful desires, pride, and other wicked doings. It’s a gateway drug to irreverent and unrighteous behavior. One day you’re laughing loudly, the next you’re coveting your neighbor’s ass.
Youth doesn’t really mind if the “free love” generation sees them as undignified or impious. They reject Lord Chesterfileld’s “true Wit and good Sense” in favor of what Henry David Thoureau called ”abandonment and childlike mirthfulness.” Their “so what” attitude manifests in anthems like the one penned by Snoop and Wiz that defies us to criticize their wild and free ideology.
That shocking philosophy is anathema to most adults. They’ve been programmed to signal to their contemporaries that they are not aligned with the vile and mirthful mob, but instead are well-bred, well-mannered, and well-behaved. Laughter is indecorous. Loud laugher worse. Those who participate in it lack propriety and self-control. Despite Nike’s appeal otherwise, respectable folks just don’t do it.
But maybe Isak was conflating maturity with age. Even though it was true that one’s level of maturity often correlates with the number of years lived, the aged didn’t have a monopoly on maturity. Isak had known people in his life who were fifty years old at nineteen. Before he could even legally buy beer, a friend of his from youth was enthralled with the idea of pantomiming a grown-up and driving the freeway to the office every morning in coat and tie. Before twenty, he had rejected youthful exuberance in favor of responsible self-management. This friend had even channeled Lord Chesterfield by vocalizing opposition to “loud laugher.” One can be chronologically young, Isak realized, yet rigidly archaic in mindset.
Ivan’s character harbored the fatalistic belief that the despair of age would assassinate his spirit by the time he was thirty. He suggested that there’s an inevitability to this surrender to seriousness, this embrace of joylessness. And perhaps there is. As Allison informed her detention-mates in The Breakfast Club, “it’s unavoidable, it just happens. When you grow up, your heart dies.”
Despite a chasm of time, distance, and culture, Ivan and Allison were saying the same thing: mirth inevitability dies with adulthood. So too does enthusiasm, expressiveness, imagination, creativity, and the other unsavory symptoms of a childlike mind. To Lord Chesterfield and his adherents, the demise of these indecent behaviors is the laudable goal.
Isak bristled. Why is laughing riotously at the world base? Why is the aim, when faced with hilarity, a furrowed brow and a smirk? Jollity and merriment are symbionts of wide-eyed naivete. When one atrophies from disuse, so does the other. Maybe that’s why freedom and beauty and awe are the first casualties of Lord Chesterfield’s rebellion against fun. When you make a Faustian pact to abandon unconstrained innocence, you sacrifice your wondrous soul.
That dispiriting thought made Isak gloomy. The world is funny, and life is too full of humor to suppress immature mirthfulness to avoid the reproachful glare of age. He would resist despair. He would be pleased with silly things. Like Ivan, he would shut out the driveling consumptive moralists and instead, follow the exhortations of Gratiano in the Merchant of Venice who declares: “With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come, and let my liver rather heat with wine, than my heart cool with mortifying groans.”
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