Possession
for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have
been Thoreau’s idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening
one’s perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the
high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the
high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into
feeding himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more
important efforts.
Effort is the gist of it. There is no
happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the
impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfaction we get from a lifetime depends on
how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost was thinking in something
like the same terms when he spoke of “the pleasure of taking pains”. The mortal
flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to
be effortless.
We demand difficulty even in our
games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. A game is
a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an
arbitrary imposition of difficulty. When someone ruins the fun, he always does
so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are
free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in
winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.