Retirement "life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom", according to Arthur Schopenhauer.
There is the challenge. As Mill struggled from his perspective.
Mill found the answer in Wordsworth as shown in the below.
"It took Mill two years to find a way out of his crisis. It was only after he began reading, not philosophy, but the poetry of William Wordsworth, that he was fully convinced he had emerged.
What was it about Wordsworth’s romantic poetry — intensely emotional (often melancholy), solitary, autobiographical, and infused with bucolic English imagery — that had such a profound healing effect on Mill? He explains:
What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connexion with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed… I needed to be made to feel that there was real, permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Wordsworth taught me this…
Mill was searching for a reliable source of joy, one that could survive the unbearable goodness of the world he sought to achieve. He was looking for a happiness that could stave off incursions of dissatisfaction or boredom once the ultimate battle is won, and (at last!) tranquility reigns. The answer, he discovered through reading Wordsworth, is to take refuge in a capacity to be moved by beauty — a capacity to take joy in the quiet contemplation of delicate thoughts, sights, sounds, and feelings, not just titanic struggles.
This discovery is convenient for a philosopher. Mill was trained, from a very young age, to think: to be a quiet contemplator. So, it’s no surprise that he was desperate to make sure he could still take joy in his allotted craft, once the hard labor of social reform was done. But, as Mill says, imaginative pleasures are available to “all human beings,” not just poets and philosophers.
I hope, and suspect, that Mill is right about this: that we all have the ability to find some durable joy in quietude, normalcy and contemplation. In our personal lives, and in our political lives too, it would be nice if we could escape Schopenhauer’s pendulum: to simply enjoy where we are, at times; to find some peace in the cessation of motion."
Retirement "life swings back and forth like a pendulum between pain and boredom", according to Arthur Schopenhauer.
There is the challenge. As Mill struggled from his perspective.
Mill found the answer in Wordsworth as shown in the below.
"It took Mill two years to find a way out of his crisis. It was only after he began reading, not philosophy, but the poetry of William Wordsworth, that he was fully convinced he had emerged.
What was it about Wordsworth’s romantic poetry — intensely emotional (often melancholy), solitary, autobiographical, and infused with bucolic English imagery — that had such a profound healing effect on Mill? He explains:
Mill was searching for a reliable source of joy, one that could survive the unbearable goodness of the world he sought to achieve. He was looking for a happiness that could stave off incursions of dissatisfaction or boredom once the ultimate battle is won, and (at last!) tranquility reigns. The answer, he discovered through reading Wordsworth, is to take refuge in a capacity to be moved by beauty — a capacity to take joy in the quiet contemplation of delicate thoughts, sights, sounds, and feelings, not just titanic struggles.
This discovery is convenient for a philosopher. Mill was trained, from a very young age, to think: to be a quiet contemplator. So, it’s no surprise that he was desperate to make sure he could still take joy in his allotted craft, once the hard labor of social reform was done. But, as Mill says, imaginative pleasures are available to “all human beings,” not just poets and philosophers.
I hope, and suspect, that Mill is right about this: that we all have the ability to find some durable joy in quietude, normalcy and contemplation. In our personal lives, and in our political lives too, it would be nice if we could escape Schopenhauer’s pendulum: to simply enjoy where we are, at times; to find some peace in the cessation of motion."