The Millions: On Teaching and the Question of Contentment

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January 20, 2008

On Teaching and the Question of Contentment

Gogol's The Overcoat and Flaubert's A Simple Heart have in common narrators who are, at least initially, satisfied with what I think many would consider very meager lives. They are both poor, single, friendless, both workers whose work (a clerk who copies documents in a Russian government office, and a maid of all work in a French bourgeois household) does not seem particularly meaningful or interesting. And yet they are both content. Deeply content: "After working to his heart's content, he would go to bed, smiling at the thought of the next day and wondering what God would send him to copy. So flowed on the peaceful life of a man who knew how to be content with his fate." This is Gogol describing his hero, but the description easily applies to Flaubert's Felicité.

Teaching these stories this week, I was not surprised exactly, but bemused, by the various shades of contempt my students showed toward these characters' lives - By and large, they found Akaky and Felicité sad, pathetic, depressing. These brightest of the bright seemed to view with horror the notion of being satisfied with so little, with such colorless, pleasureless lives. And who can blame them, when their own lives have already delivered so much more?

Hobbes wrote, "For as to have no desire, is to be Dead." And I can see that the sort of lean, desire-less lives that Flaubert and Gogol's heroes live are a sort of death-in-life. But I also envy their contentment. Contentment - the state of having all you want - is so rare. The peacefulness of such a state seems incomprehensible to me and somewhat otherworldly. It also seems that the possession of such a state erases, for the possessor at least, what appears from the outside to be small and sad life. ("There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so," as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.)

A final note on these questions, in the form of an anecdote: Diogenes of Sinope, a Greek philosopher who lived by choice as a beggar and rejected all concepts of property, manners, and social and political organization, was visited one day by Alexander the Great. Diogenes was sunning himself on a hillside as Alexander approached and when Alexander asked if there was anything he could offer the philosopher, Diogenes replied: "Stand out of my sunlight." According to Plutarch, Alexander then declared: "If I was not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes."

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 8:49 PM ~ comments: 3 ~ Links to this post

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Comments:

I love this. As an undergrad, I too would have scoffed at "contentment." 8 years or so later (8 years spent in the "rat race"), it sounds like bliss.

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Max @ January 20, 2008 8:53 PM

I was just considering teaching "The Overcoat" and here is this post! Perhaps I'll pair it, as you have, with the Flaubert (which I have, but haven't read). I wonder how the discussion of these stories would differ when seeing them from a creative writing craft perspective...? I'll report back to you on that one.

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Edan @ January 20, 2008 9:45 PM

Actually, the class I am ta-ing for is taught by a creative writing professor and a lot of the students are CW majors. The idea of reading these two stories together wasn't mine, but I think it seemed to work well. I think it can be easier to read either when the two are read together. I also found myself thinking a lot about Stranger than Fiction's Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) as the ancestor of Akaky and Felicite.

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