As I stepped out of the door to start my morning walk a Wisconsin moai greeted me. It  - or he? -is very much like his big brothers on the Easter Island but much smaller and extremely cooler as it is made of snow turning into ice – and probably into water if the unseasonally mild temperature continues to rise as predicted.

The little guy stands in the middle of the sidewalk one foot behind the invisible borderline between our real estate and the neighbor’s friendly greeting the surprised, baffled, intrigued schoolchildren heading toward the school bus station. I hope the friendly smiles and the rising temperature will not reduce him to a puddle of tears before my daughter wakes up and meets him.

Ethel KVALHEIM Lane

We are both transcultural travelers and therefore our sources of entertainment will never dry up.

The last two days we took our camera to capture aspects of the American suburban culture that in another cultural context might look or sound hilarious or intriguing.

Thus our German friends will savor the name Ethel Kvalheim Lane. As 30% of the local population is of Norwegian ancestry I am sure the word ‘Kval’ in Norwegian has a totally different meaning than the German word ‘Qual’ (‘torture’) and they would not conjure up pictures of Lady Ethel torturing her family in their home (‘Heim’). Or Ethel being the name of a jail where people are tortured, a torture-home. That would make no sense. To make sense she should have changed her name into “Guantanamo Kvalheim’.

The sign “NO CONCEALED WEAPONS BEYOND THIS POINT” will fill with admiration all our friends outside the USA for our courage, bravery and toughness to walk these streets with our weapons concealed. Up to that point, that is.

It turned out what I actually heard was ‘ ‘Ravishingly Russian’  http://www.msrcd.com/catalog/cd/MS1311

What are we experiencing each December? A wild rush fore more things. Back in 1998 I was almost crushed by the shopping multitudes in the center of the Westphalian city of Münster. The next advent Sunday the crowd managed to really stomp a person to death there. Here in the US I saw the same stampede for more things on TV as ‘Black Friday’.

I remember Georges Perec’s first novel, ‘Les Choses’ that describes how a young couple explores “happiness” in a consumer society by surrounding and burying themselves under an increasing number of objects. The English title ‘Things: A Story of the Sixties’ pretends the phenomenon was limited to the Sixties of the previous century.

“Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necesitate” is a statement known as Occam’s razor, or Ockham’s razor, and word for word it means that “entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity.” It is sometimes expressed in Latin as ‘lex parsimoniae’ (the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle that generally recommends from among competing hypotheses selecting the one that makes the fewest new assumptions.

If  we were to translate this recommendation from the realm of epistemology into the realm of everyday life we might say: do not multiply things beyond necessity. I could also say: ‘stop reifying!’ (from Latin ‘res’ thing + ‘facere’to make, reification can be loosely translated as thing-making; ) or ‘stop making more things than needed!’

Today the legendary light bulb went up in my head and I found the diagnostic name of the disease that takes epidemic proportions every year in December:

CHREMOLATRY. I made it up from the Greek words

chrema = a thing,(also: business, spec. money, riches)

+ -latry = worship

I waive the copyright on it and send it out to my friends and acquaintances as a diagnostic name they can also use as a diagnostic tool by asking themselves the question:

“How deep am I affected by CHREMOLATRY? How deep am I worshipping things and how much do I contribute to their multiplication beyond necessity?”

Would our merry race go on multiplying the things on the face of the earth, polluting also the air, the water, even our brains if we asked us this question? Would the cult of multiplying things beyond necessity reach its paroxysm at the end of each year?

I doubt it. No appeal to reason has led to more reasonable conduct of life on a mass level in the long run.

On an individual level, however, the question might lead to the question “what are the things that I really need?” and might even mark the starting point of a wonderful journey of self-knowledge, purification, simplification, stress elimination. Or even peace of mind that is happiness.

I am sorry to admit that I am no exception in my Epicurean happiness guide “From Pain to Pleasure: The  Proven Pathway to Happiness” , in the just published paperback edition, too…

Because it is a misquote. I have just found it out from Jules Evans in an article entitled Fake quotes he published on Sunday, 18 December 2011 in his blog.

I also found out from Jules’ blog entry that I am not alone with this misquote. Others widely misquote, too, and not only  Aristotle but also John Stuart Mill, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi.

Commenting on Jules’ article Greg Linser refers us to  ‘Falser Words Were Never Spoken’ by Brian Morton, published in the New York Times who mentions Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso “all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.”

From now on I guess I’d better stick to quoting people I know firsthand, like myself:

“Check the source before you quote, or you risk to misquote and be exposed.”

Jules Evans, Aristotle, John Stuart Mill, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi,  Greg Linser, Brian Morton,  New York Times, , From Pain to Pleasure: The  Proven Pathway to Happiness, Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso

My friends can buy the little funny Epicurean happiness guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” I wrote with my wife as a paperback either form Amazon or directly from my own eStore, also powered by Amazon through CreateSpace.

I encourage my friends to buy from my eStore, as the royalties paid by Amazon are less than one dollar per sold copy and will not contribute substantially toward paying my huge hospital bills.

I have also reminded my friends that life is too short to spend any minute of it worrying or stressing out ourselves and others and that stress can be deadly. (If they want to have the facts, they can read my stress report – downloadable for free here.)

The one question most people stress out over every year in December is “What presents to make whom?” Those of my friends who have not made a decision yet should seriously consider buying my little funny Epicurean happiness guidance “From Pain to Pleasure: The Proven Pathway to Happiness” as it it is the ideal present they can give anybody you love and care for, including their precious selves.

If they are on a lower budget this year, they can still get the downloadable eBook version for half of the price of the paperback here

In addition, they can still download the first chapter for free here

The most precious present I received came from my oncologist: as per last medical checkup: I am still cancer-FREE, no recurrence so far.

I gave a talk on Epicurus’s life, teachings, and influence in August this year in Madison, Wisconsin. The professional young man who made the video recording lost most of it. My son edited the footage I recorded myself from a silly angle and he uploaded the first two parts – Epicurus’s life and teachings –  to his ownYouTube channel as it is 34 minutes long and I cannot upload to my own channel anything longer than 15 minutes.

As for the third part, Epicurus’s influence, I still have the slides and the sound recording and I plan to make more slides and record a presentation at home.

My recommendation to my friends was this year to enjoy every single day of their remaining lives in leisurely stress-FREEDOM, quoting Epicurus: “We have been born once and cannot be born a second time; for all eternity we shall no longer exist. But you, although you are not in control of tomorrow, are postponing your happiness. Life is wasted by delaying, and each one of us dies without enjoying leisure.”

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-          first: if happiness consists of the fulfilling of human possibilities then there must be broadly applicable rules for attaining it.

-          second: in this case we can “learn happiness”  by following these rules.

They stressed rather the process and not one or the other event.  A happy life meant for them a contented life a life lived in harmony with their values and tastes. The core elements of happiness were:

- inner peace and freedom (in the sense of not being disturbed by passions)

- physical and psychological independence

How did they achieve this state?

The ancient Greeks strongly believed in practice: “everything is practice” – they used to say. Philosophers ran in fact “happiness schools” to train the mind of their students. They believed that insight helped only when people were trained to apply it. Their goal was to form the student’s character so that he would live a happier and more balanced life. The key was the purposeful repetition of certain experiences.

The central thought of classical philosophy about happiness is today still valid and corroborated by modern science, especially neurobiology: positive feelings are not a matter of destiny. We can and must strive for them.

Do not confuse this concept of happiness with the modern – and unrealistic – idea interpreting it as a pleasure without a history and without costs.

You can find the results of modern scientific research on happiness in Stefan Klein’s book: The science of happiness. http://www.stefanklein.info/en/index_en.html

See also: http://www.gluecksformel.de/links.html – lots of relevant links, most of them in German but some also in English

the full interview (23 min):  http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/11977

a 5 minutes cut:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DOv4KPkUDY

Finally I almost managed to bring my legal status in line with my cultural identity:  a Central European in the Midwest, a legal alien.

My wife says I shouldn’t call myself an alien or even a legal alien, though. She says they don’t use that technical term any more in the US but another technical term: ‘permanent resident’ or the non-technical term: ‘recent immigrant’. This is technically correct, since the Wikipedia defines an alien as someone “who has temporary or permanent residence in a country (which is foreign to him/her)” It further proposes that he or she “ may be called a resident alien of that country. This is a subset of the aforementioned legal alien category.”

My personal view on the matter is that there are advantages in being a bit of an outsider: you can distance yourself more easily from the local forms of culturally accepted idiosyncrasies (like no speed limit in Germany or shooting your family, neighbors and presidents in the US, or beating your wife in Hungary) and have more fun discovering new manifestations thereof.

I only run into difficulties when I am pressed by my children who are dual citizens of Hungary and Germany to give coherent explanations. I keep on avoiding to discuss this issue until they grow a bit more so they can read How To Be An Alien by George Mikes (whose contributions to Radio Free Europe were definitely funnier than mine and so are his explanations regarding the legal and cultural status of being an alien).

But I might still have to teach them somehow the lesson Sting learned as an Englishman in New York:

“It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say.”

That would have been perfectly acceptable in any country in East or South Europe,  where political correctness is not part of the national hypocrisy toolbox.

Back in the late 1990s I did business development in East Europe for a German company and all export business development managers assembled every year three times to exchange their ideas and experiences at the German headquarter. On one of these occasions we had to be trained to use a new software but the software manager had left for vacation without leaving the password for his substitute. It took the substitute about two hours to reach him and during this time we all told dirty jokes, except our German colleagues who were embarrassed since the ribald words marking the punch line of a joke translated into German were only ribald and vulgar but not funny.

Our German colleagues shook their heads incredulously also when I told them that little booklets entitled ‘The best Gypsy Jokes’ and ‘The Best Jew Jokes’ are sold at every railway station and at hundreds of other places in Budapest by Gypsies. And I’m sure they are collected and published by Jews.