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Ecstasy (or Bliss, though I like the drug better than the chocolate. Hypothetically, of course)

So, long story short, I wrote something not entirely compulsory for my English class. I'm not going to go deep into backstory territory here, but I feel like I owe ya'll something. Only rudimentary knowledge of Fahrenheit 451 is helpful, not required.  I did some editing and will have a short afterword, but here it goes:

On Friday, the Do Now on your board consisted of three parts, but the part that stood out to everyone in the class [I admit, I presume; for me at least] was the first. “What is happiness”, you asked us, a class of fifteen and sixteen year olds. After much debate over which characters were happy and which ones were not, that part of the question got a little bit overshadowed.

I spent a lot of time thinking about that question this weekend. The definition I wrote on my paper, one that I now consider incorrect, is “an intense feeling of satisfaction”. Satisfaction isn’t happiness; satisfaction leads to contentedness. So, as I sat on the bus on my ride home, I pondered,  “What is happiness?”

Before I came to a definite conclusion about happiness, I realized that the questions you had asked us wasn’t one that couldn’t be answered. Maybe you never intended an actual answer when you asked them, but it seems unfair that there should be questions like that in an English class,and not in Philosophy. I believe that I should clarify that the unanswerable question was whether or not the characters were happy.

Happiness is not a permanent state. I believe that is where your question and I split off the most; your question implied that happiness was a binary state, that one could either be happy or unhappy, with no middle ground. Clarisse IS happy, the class decided; but what did that mean?

I think of happiness as more of a short-term status effect, almost like a “high”. In fact, “high” would be the perfect word to describe the phenomenon. Instead of a constant state one could be in, happiness is a flash, a short time of ecstasy to be countered, almost immediately, with pain and displeasure.

The assumption that Clarisse was happy seemed and seems silly to me. In a society like the one they live in, no one can be happy. Happiness is defined by its contrast. Something can’t be fast unless there is something slow to which a comparison could be made. Similarly, in a society where sadness is obsolete and non-existent, how could anyone be happy?

Speaking of the prospect of someone being happy, fake happiness is another thing that was brought up during the class discussion. People seemed unanimous in their decision that Mildred was fake happy; she believed herself to be happy, but she wasn’t. According to my above description of happiness, these people would be right; she has no contrast, so she can’t be more than normal at any time.

This upset me, because I don’t believe in fake happiness. If one believes themselves to be happy, they are. Not the kind of “believe-I’m-happy” that Guy indulges, because he has doubts about himself and his happiness. Mildred honestly believes, with all of her heart and soul, that she is happy; so why can’t she be?

Much like the characters in the Matrix, everyone in their society believes what they are wanted to believe. Guy’s civilization is taught that they are happy all the time, so they are. Neo’s civilization is taught that the Matrix is the real world, so it is. If you asked someone in the Matrix whether the world they lived in was real, everyone single one would have said yes. Does that mean that the Matrix isn’t real, that nothing that goes on there is real? Morpheus asked Neo what was real, and no true answer was given.

As I round the first page and run, with no sign of stopping onto another, my classmates are undoubtedly wondering why I spent so much time of my life on this, and whether or not I really had anything better to do this weekend.  To that I say.................

I’m hoping someone in this room will take something away from this. Look at what a book like Fahrenheit 451 can do to a poor kid like me. I’m hoping one of you, at least one of you, will think the next time a seemingly easy question like that is asked.

Think like Guy Montag. Think different.

Quite the doozy (sp?), huh? Yeah, I composed the letter because I felt like I needed to write it. Normally, I'd let it ooze murkily out of your computer screen, rather than broadcast it to my English class, but change is nice sometimes.

This one definitely reads better out loud, so maybe I should record it with my silky smooth voice. Nah, that takes some of the mystery out of this site. Even though 98.765% of my readers know who I am.