Not in Kansas Anymore

Today happiness tends to be measured on a material scale. It is all about who has the bigger house, faster car, nicer clothes, and the more expensive jewelry. For ages mankind has searched the earth for material goods believing with all their hearts that happiness comes in the form of a dollar sign. Everything will be alright if we just have that one thing, people will like and respect me, I’ll have enough of this to fix everything, and I’ll never have to worry again. Sound familiar? I’ll admit that I am guilty of these thoughts too. Life would be so easy if we just had that one material thing to fix it all for us. However we must remember the saying, no matter cliché it may sound, but truly happiness cannot be bought. Happiness is a state of mind, and while material goods are nice, I find that for me personally, I find that it is experiences and people that truly make me the happiest.

            These thoughts are closer examined in the book East, West by Salman Rushdie’s short story “At the Auction of the Ruby Slippers.” The story takes the reader to a time and place where men “nowadays are sick” where everything is for sale and the more you have the happier you are. (87) Let me clarify, when I say that everything is for sale I mean everything. In this “courtroom of demand” they have auctioned off the “Taj Mahal, the Statue of Liberty, the Alphs, the Sphinx” people have gone as far as to sell “wives and purchase husbands” even human souls are for sale in this world. (99, 98) It is in this desperate time we meet our narrator, a desperate man who has been crushed by an ex lover who now seeks a power that will take him back to a time when he was happy. This power comes in the form of ruby slippers that our narrator and the rest of the world will stop at nothing to own.

Once the bidding begins, nothing else matters. He bids until there is no one else left to bid. Suddenly, through sheer enlightenment our narrator realizes that these shoes cannot bring him happiness or make his ex-lover Gale return to him. He drops out of the bid and returns to his house and falls asleep only to awaken the next day free of worry and refreshed, perhaps not completely happy, but probably closer to it than anyone had been in a long time. I think the enlightenment of knowing that happiness cannot be bought freed him from his material chains that bound him to his depression.

It is true that having material goods certainly does make our lives less stressful and easier to go through, but I still stand by my belief that once we are free of our material bonds we then able to see the things that really matter and will be there long after the material goods have lost their value.