Everyday Canvas

Enjoying Life

“In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much,” says Vladimir Nabokov in Speak Memory.
What do you think he means and do you agree with him?

====

My question is how can a decent person enjoy life without feeling any responsibility, if not for the whole vista but for herself and those around her?

Then, I might reverse myself and ask what’s wrong with enjoying life?

In answer to both my questions, there is nothing wrong with enjoying life. In fact, life is made to be enjoyed. The trick is in the how of it.

The problem here lies with a person who thinks he or she is enjoying life by going to the excesses like addictions or she thinks enjoying life means imitating people who think they are enjoying life. This is an important distinction, which I learned while raising my two sons.

In my opinion, to enjoy life in this goal-obsessed society, we can pat ourselves on the back for our small wins and consider our losses as learning opportunities. After all, our feelings pass and no one can be deliriously happy all the time.

When we choose well, invest in ourselves by being aware of the consequences of our actions, noting how we manage our time, minimizing mental clutter, noticing the stuff to be grateful about, exploring new avenues, keeping our minds active, and building positive relationships, we can’t avoid but be happy.

What-the-enjoyment-of- life-is-not takes the form of naively imitating the life styles of others, doing things to excess like getting dead drunk to end up in a coma, and taking pride in hurting a person or anything alive.

Then, in fairness to Vladimir Nabokov, granted that he has a pessimistic outlook due to his personal life experiences, I took this quote somewhat out of context. The way I understood it, he was talking about our short time on earth. I’m going to post here what he exactly said, be it a longish excerpt.

“…first and last things often tend to have an adolescent note—unless, possibly, they are directed by some venerable and rigid religion. Nature expects a full-grown man to accept the two black voids, fore and aft, as stolidly as he accepts the extraordinary vision in between. Imagination, the supreme delight of the immortal and the immature, should be limited. In order to enjoy life, we should not enjoy it too much.

“I rebel against this state of affairs. I feel the urge to take my rebellion outside and picket nature. Over and over again, my mind has made colossal efforts to distinguish the faintest of personal glimmer in the impersonal darkness on both sides of my life.”