By Jason Haas
An inquiry of this sort must first pay a visit to the text of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. In his history of the Greco-Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C.E., Herodotus devoted a fair bit of writing to King Croesus of Lydia. The story bears repeating for those not familiar with it. By Herodotus' account, Croesus was one of the wealthiest individuals in the ancient Western world, and the king believed this wealth gave him a commensurate happiness. This view was challenged when Croesus received Solon the wise Athenian as a guest in his palace. After Solon was shown the king's vast treasuries over the period of four days, an audience with the king awaited. There, King Croesus asked Solon for his opinion on who was the happiest man in the world.
Solon answered, "Tellus of Athens, sire." Flabbergasted that he had not been declared the happiest, Croesus demanded Solon's justification. Solon answered that Tellus was happiest for having lived in a flourishing land and seeing both of his sons grow to adulthood. (Whether Tellus had daughters was not reported, or relevant, to Herodotus). Tellus then surpassed most by dying, not of old age, but in battle against a neighboring state. He was given a public funeral, one of the highest honors in ancient Athens. Content in his life and vaunted after his death, Tellus bore the legacy of a great and truly happy man.
Croesus demanded to know who Solon thought was the second happiest man in the world, overly confident that Solon would name him after seeing his immense treasury. Instead, Solon pronounced the names Cleobis and Bito. Each of these brothers had been a victor at the Olympic games, and had personally pulled a cart bearing their mother to a festival of the goddess Hera! This act was seen in such a good light that their mother asked the goddess to "bestow on Cleobis and Bito, the sons who had so mightily honoured her, the highest blessing to which mortals can attain." After prayers, animal sacrifice, and a holy banquet, the young men fell asleep there in the temple. From this sleep, they never awoke, for they had been spirited away by the goddess as a reward for their selfless task.
Still amazed to find himself yet excluded from the Solon’s list of the happiest of men, Croesus pressed Solon for his reasoning. Solon explained, "He who unites the greatest number of advantages, and retaining them to the day of his death, then dies peaceably, that man alone, sire, is, in my judgment, entitled to bear the name of 'happy.' But in every matter it behooves us to mark well the end: for oftentimes the gods give men a gleam of happiness, and then plunge them into ruin."
By Solon's standard, Croesus was a man of great fortune, which was different from having great happiness. In essence, Solon said, Do not judge a person as being happy until they are dead. For only then can such judgment be pronounced.
In that light, I find it curious that the question on the nature of happiness should come to me. Once, in all but the literal biological sense, I think that I have died. Or at very least, I came closer to death than any living being should ever want to.
Dead, Almost, and After
On the evening of March 10, 2000, I was sitting at a red light in Savannah, Ga., when a drunk driver rammed a huge SUV into my very small, older car.
He hit me. My chest smashed the steering wheel. My head bashed through the windshield. My face was torn and lacerated, my nose smashed, and my left eye was shredded. That the sheer force of the impact damaged my internal organs almost seems like an afterthought.
Despite this, I did not die.
The next time that I remember waking up and being aware of the world was at least a month later. I didn't know where I was, or for that matter, who I was—though that came back soon enough. Still, six weeks of my life are gone thanks to the stupidity of the young man who drove his daddy’s huge car after a hard night’s drinking.
How, then, does surviving this horror make me a happy man—no, a content man—today?
While I have been receiving monetary compensation for the crash from the fool who hit me, I got no great joy from depositing the checks. It hardly needs to be said that no money could replace my eye, or make up for the painful eternity that the aftermath of the crash must have been for my wife and family. While I got a trifling check to cover the estimated value of a 1989 Honda Civic DX hatchback, it is impossible to place a monetary value on the marriage that the crash had also destroyed. My now ex-wife Cassandra was true to her vows in caring for me in the long months afterward. Sadly, an overwhelming majority of couples who experience the great traumas that come through debilitating car crashes end in divorce, as did ours. Thus, money has not made for happiness after surviving my personal apocalypse.
Some time after the crash, I concluded that some part of me had died that night. While I was never clinically dead, the hospital that I was taken to kept me under deep sedation for somewhere between one to two weeks. Even if I had been awake, my brain was so bollixed by the crash that it was incapable of storing memories of that time. And my body was so wrecked that it would have been a waking hell to dwell in it. I was kept in a drug-induced coma while my body pulled itself back from the brink, and kept my swollen brain from being moved and further injured.
In short, I survived. No funeral was held, no memorial placard or flowers placed at the intersection where that cretin tried to drive through me. But in my mind's eye, I had died. For about a month, I have absolutely no memory of being in the world. While life certainly went on around me, with family members visiting and taking pictures I don’t remember being taken. According to the hospital, I was never dead, as I later walked out alive. (Or at least rolled out in a wheelchair that they insisted on putting me in en route to my wife’s car.) Though she later would disagree with my assertion, my then-wife held a "re-birthday party" for me on March 10, 2001. My friends were very glad to see me alive and generally well, as was I.
As you may well imagine, this sort of event will cause you to take stock of your life and look very carefully at where and how you will try to head next. I thought that meant coming back to Madison, Wis., the city I had left in 1998 due to frustration with living there without having a college degree, which meant I could not get a good job. Now, nine years after that fateful crash, and five years after moving to Milwaukee, I have earned my undergraduate degree in history from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. For I had learned that one of the best things I could do to keep my brain in shape in the long run was to complete a college education. Academically speaking, I flourished. I argued in my senior thesis that Germany’s fate in the First World War was a result of an inadequate food supply, which led to significant unrest on the home front. It was a genuine pleasure to receive top grades on that paper, having been unable to think about anything but the great pain in my body just a few years earlier. And thanks to a professor who whipped her students’ brains into shape with critical thinking exercises, as well as the whole academic process, my brain feels in better shape than ever before.
I still see the result of the crash every day as I look upon the world. My left eye can still see, though it cannot focus on anything—the eye surgeon had to remove the lens in order to remove all of the windshield glass. I’ve had a touch shorter temper since then as well; such is the result of being hit from behind by a 6,000-pound blunt instrument. Despite that, I have largely flourished. It’s not often that you have your face pressed up against (or through) the glass of life and live to tell about it.
The fool who hit me went on to become a Princeton graduate and Wall Street economist. And he is the lucky recipient of 30 days a summer in the Chatham County, Georgia jail. I believe he will be completing his sentence in the summer of 2010. This knowledge gives me a satisfaction that justice has been performed, but just as Solon advised King Croesus that he would find no true happiness from his wealth, I gain no particular happiness from the monetary compensation I have gained from the crash.
Instead, my deep contentment comes from my friends and family, and from knowing that I live in a place that, while ridden with deep problems, enables me to explore matters such as this, while not fearing the repressive hand of the government or the blow of a terrorist’s bomb. For that matter, I do not often fear a repeat of the personal tragedy of March 10, 2000. It may happen, it always could happen. But there is no reason to live in active fear of that. Perhaps that is it: Having seen some of the worst a person can do, yet having survived and dramatically recovered, I fear not what other bad things could happen. Instead, I have the liberation of knowing how limited our presence here can be, and seek to make the best of it for myself, my family, and those around us in the city of Milwaukee. As Solon described the life of Tellus of Athens, whom he thought was the happiest man in the world, I seek to help Milwaukee flourish again, and to see my children grow to adulthood.
That said, judge me not yet a happy man. For I am still alive—and very happy about it!
Jason Haas is a resident of Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood. After studying history, he often relishes not knowing what comes next.
Herodotus quotations from The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, translated by Andrea L. Purvis and edited by Robert B. Strassler.
Herodotus quotations from The Landmark Herodotus: The Histories, translated by Andrea L. Purvis and edited by Robert B. Strassler.
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