The Pursuit of Happiness

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If you read a lot of novels you’ve likely stumbled onto a character that makes you think the author has written your autobiography. You’ll find yourself saying, “yup, that’s exactly what I think, do, feel.”

Duane’s Depressed, by Larry McMurtry, is such a book. It’s about a man who gets out of his pickup truck one day and thereafter refuses to drive or ride in a motorized road vehicle of any sort. The people around him think he’s lost his mind, but the real story is about him finding it. Along the way a psychiatrist tells him to read Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

It seems an odd recommendation for a Texas working man, which Duane is, and it’s full of 700 word sentences about nothing much. He finds it hard going but becomes both surprised and calmed to discover that an oil patch guy could have things in common with a gay mama’s boy living in France.

Remembrance, sometimes called In Search of Lost Time, may be the longest memoir ever written. Few people are able to finish all 7 volumes, but Duane does. What he learns is that life’s big markers, like status and death, are commonplace and ordinary, while small things like the taste of cake dipped in tea are remarkable and memorable.

Duane is devastated when his wife dies in a car accident, but he goes on, endures, and meets her over and over again in memory, and in the feel and smell of soil, common garden vegetables, and bird sound. He remembers her with love unencumbered by the rules or judgments or conditions that govern most relationships among the living. Whether Duane’s lesson resonates with everyone is open to debate, but there are brute realities beyond anyone’s control; it helps to step back from time to time and eat cake, drink tea.

This comes to mind when I observe people rushing, conniving, to build a mountain of possessions so wide and high they can’t see the narrowing box canyon they’ve made life into. Money is important, but we all learn, sooner than we know, that we’ve got more money than we do time.