(no subject)
O dear, I seem to have the okkards today, or the world has, lots of dropping stuff and tripping and minor computer hassles. Possibly due to not sleeping very well last night, due to twingey knee, which I suspect not so much hip-related as to rather dim action of mine on the legcurl machine at the gym yesterday.
***
Reading this this morning in Guardian G2:
It's one of the great myths of our age, and one you hear voiced by middle-class professionals regularly. Poor people in developing countries are much happier than rich people like us in the west. They're too busy trying to survive to worry about the little things that get us down. Depression, or at least a mild sense of unease, is an affliction unique to the west.
reminded me of a post I sort of meant to make last week riffing off something someone posted about some claim about the pernicious strains of modern life and how people in Teh Past were happier and less stressed....
Which made me think of them waking up and going 'O happy happy day! Still haven't got the Black Death/cholera/syphilis/puerperal fever/etc. And the scurvy/rickets/rheumatism isn't so very bad this morning.'
When Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages (good grief, first published 1924, and it was still a set book for my Medieval History course) suggested that in the late MA pleasures might have been more intense, I think it was because they were rare and life was so miserable, that sitting in front of a roaring fire drinking mulled wine in your furlined gown in the depths of winter was absolutely ecstatic. Not that your Medeeevle Peepul had a less stressful life and could just kick back and smell the flowers (over the pervasive stenches...)
Being alive and staying alive and coping with life has always, I would suggest, been stressful, whatever the particular stresses of a given historical moment. Just maybe they had fewer bigger stresses and we have more smaller, but even that, I suspect, is open to question.