“…some people take drugs to chemically induce a happiness they cannot otherwise achieve; others drink to excess for the same reason. Still others throw themselves into religious frenzies in a bout of self-intoxication. All are seeking happiness. But happiness, even Heaven, is the absence of further progress. When one is happy, one wants no more than that, and will spend his life in a search to keep the brain’s pleasure center permanently on. It is the essence of humanity. We learn, we progress, by our unending quest for eternal happiness—yet should we achieve it, it all stops.”

from Soul Rider book 3: Masters of Flux and Anchor

Jack Chalker published the Soul Rider series in the mid-Eighties, a bit after the first five novels in the Well World Series but before he returned to that earlier series in the Nineties. The first three novels in Soul Rider are really one extended story in three volumes. It starts by describing the adventures of a young girl, Cassie, who grows up in a rural farming community in a place called Anchor Logh. Her planet, World, consists of twenty-eight “Anchors” all surrounded by this mysterious energy called Flux. Anchors are really like very large islands. They have conventional Earth-like properties and seem quite ordinary: filled with farms or factories; people live, work, have children and die all under the watchful gaze of the matriarchal Church in conjunction with the patriarchal local government.

these three look pretty happy to me

Flux is something quite different and generally frightening to most of these “Anchor-folk.” It’s a kind of energy field surrounding the Anchors that some people can manipulate with their minds. The strongest, called “wizards,” can create anything they wish out of Flux, including changing human bodies and even minds to completely control all those around them less adept at handling Flux.

The Soul Rider is something unknown even to itself but at the start of the first novel it is inexplicably drawn to Cassie and enters her mind as a kind of symbiot. Through various complex political machinations, Cassie along with a number of other young people are sold into slavery to Flux. The story is very intricate, with lots of schemes and counter-schemes, and like all good sci-fi, finishes with a nail-biting confrontation with the “end of the world” where all the mysteries are more or less explained. There’s even a “scientific explanation” given for magic. Meanwhile it’s quite a ride.

Cassie gets tortured, brainwashed, becomes a saint, a powerful wizard, a mother, a wife and a mindless sex slave at various times throughout the book. Her children and loved ones fare little better. Much of the author’s philosophizing is about the relationship between men and women and the human tendency to exploit one another. These people are not nice and they use their powers, magical and technological, ruthlessly. Church leaders, wizards, warlords, husbands and wives, lovers, parents and children, scientists and dreamers all backstab, manipulate or otherwise mess with each other for personal ambition or revenge. By the end, everything all sort of “works out,” but at a dreadful cost.

It’s in this context that the wizard Mervyn, one of “the Nine” whose mission is to protect World from the opening of the “Hellgates,” makes those pessimistic comments about happiness quoted above. Is it really true that happiness is merely a chemical reaction that the brain is striving to maintain at all costs? Are we all seeking that kind of happiness, and would everything really stop if we achieved it?

I’m constantly hearing people tell me that they’d be happy if they could just find that perfect girl/boyfriend, get a better job, have more money or less debt, have better health, weigh less (or, rarely, more), were younger or older, were the other sex, looked more attractive, lived somewhere else, you name it. Yet so often after achieving one of these dreams; an example for me was moving to California, which I’d been sure would make me ecstatically happy; the effect gradually wears off. I still love it here but I’m not intoxicated with delight every day. That’s always the problem with these wishes, isn’t it?

I’m not sure that I can agree with old Mervyn that drugs or drink are a way to achieve this exalted level of happiness. There is no doubt that these things affect the mood and sometimes that’s in the happiness direction. So often, though, drugs and alcohol in serious users tend to cause more problems than anything else. These sad folk end up taking more and more not to feel good but to avoid thinking and feeling bad about all their problems, including the problem of their drug dependency itself. Drugs are a dead end if you ask me.

So where does that leave us? Is happiness a mirage? Chalker’s characters in the Soul Rider series realize many of their dreams at various times but are mostly left angry and miserable as time goes by. At their best, they are at peace with compromises that they’ve made with the powerful forces around them. That’s it, though. Not “happy,” just “O.K.”

Perhaps it’s the model of “happiness” that’s the real issue. Peak happiness happens, thank goodness! It simply never lasts. Feeling good all the time sounds great on paper, but maybe it’s kinda unrealistic. Why not adjust our expectations to fit better with reality? That’s what Cassie et al. finally did on World. How marvelous to have these joyful bursts from time to time. Working toward a sense of general wellbeing, not the vanishing ecstatic extreme, is my goal. I get the idea that Chalker thought so too. If that’s true, than at least we can safely put Mervyn’s fear of the end of progress to rest. It will never stop because permanent ecstatic happiness is always out of reach. That’s not as gloomy as it sounds. Personally I enjoy things more when they’re mixed with things that are less exciting. It’s the variety that makes stuff interesting.

Reading this three volume novel made me very happy, at least for a while. The story’s disturbing but also thrilling and thought provoking. That good feeling is already fading and I only finished the third novel last night. I suppose that I’ll have to start on something else soon to get that literary “rush” once again. But I’m still feeling fine right now.

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could these two stunning women be French?

I just finished Mireille Guiliano’s French Women for All Seasons, the sequel to her bestselling French Women Don’t Get Fat. Like the first, this book is a guide to thinness and the good life. The name for this blog entry comes from one of her section headings on wine; and just like champagne, this work is effervescent, sometimes silly or dry, but always a pleasure and always in style. Guiliano, somewhat mischievously, makes a big point of writing “I don’t do or recommend diets.” Surely that is a bit tongue-in-cheek as much of the text is about finding that slim you and learning to feel bien dans sa peau, or good in your skin, about it. Her fairly well-worn idea is that faddish, American-style diets don’t work. Well, duh. She offers, then, a plan for reshaping your outlook on food, drink and life in order to reshape your body; instead of starving yourself over a few weeks and then ballooning up again and again.

The book is divided into four main sections, representing the traditional four seasons. In them she develops her fashion ideas for each season with accompanying recipes using seasonal ingredients. These chapters are followed by a last few which offer specific guidance on other, related subjects; like developing a taste for wine, planning parties and entertaining, a special commentary on unusual (to Americans) French foods, and an amusing section in which she describes the meanings of some of the various French expressions that she sprinkles so liberally throughout the book. That last bit is rather infectious, non?

The book glows with Guiliano’s personal anecdotes about her childhood in France as well as her adulthood living and working in New York. She’s full of opinions about women’s fashion and deportment, exercise and the culture of food. Sometimes these bons mots seem harsh. This example struck me particularly, both because of its obvious validity and the writer’s brutal humor in exposing this common foible: “Others take the arrival of summer sun as the occasion to roast like poulets on a spit, heedless of common sense, let alone medical fact. Raising the bar for what constitutes a healthy glow, they compel their more vampirish sisters to slather on the tanner-in-a-tube, which leaves virtually all complexions some shade of cantaloupe.” She’s not that tough all of the time. Usually, Guiliano’s advice is more businesslike yet compassionate. To the nervous potential hostess, she writes:

I know a lot of people panic or obsess over looking and doing their best. We can all become insecure about hosting and sometimes have the feeling that people are coming to judge us. But that’s nonsense. Most of them will have made up their minds about you well before they ever show up; if they’ve accepted your invitation, that already says a lot. Besides, even reluctant acceptors still want to have a good time. Nobody shows up determined not to. Really, you’ve got them from hello.

No truer words were ever written!

Despite the book’s title, her helpful suggestions about weight and portion control can apply equally to both sexes. I’m curious about several of her recipes, especially the fiddle head fern pasta for springtime. I hope to make that one when fiddle heads return. A lot of the recipes call for dairy. This is French cooking after all. Guiliano’s not shy about using butter, eggs, milk and cream, seemingly with abandon. She’s no stranger to meat dishes, either. I passed over those recipes without incident. She confesses her chocolate addiction openly. This is one of her personal “offenders” that leads her down the path to overweight. This problem doesn’t prevent her from offering loads of decadent chocolate dessert recipes for the reader to drool over. Fortunately, I’m not that into chocolate, so I can handle it.

Many of the dishes that she describes are standard French stuff. She has her version of vichyssoise, also known as cold leek and potato soup, a few kinds of mousse, and oysters prepared several ways. I was enchanted with that last but still remain too intimidated by shucking them to really test-drive those recipes. Perhaps someday… She does have some more adventurous fare, like farfalle with edamame, and frogs’ legs, though these are few and far between. I liked her emphasis on eating good foods in season and frequenting farmers’ markets as a way to improve taste.

No doubt Guiliano’s central idea is correct: portion control and regular exercise accompanied by the occasional indulgence probably is the best way to reduce and maintain your desired weight. What makes her program innovative compared to the run-of-the-mill diet plan is that last, indulge-yourself-occasionally part. Have fun, but in moderation, s’il vous plait!

I enjoyed this book quite a lot but sort of wonder about what makes it so pleasant. The recipes are fairly traditional, her fashion suggestions are positively old-school (no jeans, now really!?!) and the plan for weight control is the same thing that my primary care physician tells me whenever I go in for a visit. I think that it must be all of the Frenchie stuff.

Guiliano’s life seems terribly glamorous. She lives in Paris and New York, where she owns apartments in both places; she has a summer home in Provence; she and her husband frequently travel to Italy where they go wine tasting with ancient barons and baronesses in Tuscany; she is a high level executive for the famous champagne house, Veuve Cliquot. She seems to have done everything, and with such style! Amazing!

What is it about French people criticizing America that makes a book such a delight?

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