After the fall of the Berlin Wall, among the first imports into the Communist East were… diaries. Simple journals sealed with golden padlocks and minuscule keys to guard secrets and wishes of children, and children who had grown just a little.
Other treasures included books, music, a half century of art and movies, chocolate bars, spices, herbs, scented detergent, liberty,
And the promise of happiness, most importantly.
It was advertised on billboards, flyers and posters on every wall: Sex! Wealth! Success! In the form of cars, Big Macs, shoes, televisions. All for the taking, for sale, often on sale: buy more, get more free. Wishes developed into wish lists. Those kept growing.
Entries in diaries migrated to balance sheets. The little golden keys, anyway, got lost in the piles of things. With them, the secrets, experiences, memories, dreams that once were enough. That once were treasured. Treasure itself stopped being a verb.
Then stopped being entirely; it meant nothing anymore. There was simply too much of it. Too many books, records, Monet prints, sitcoms, aisles in supermarkets, smells and lipstick shades in the cosmetics department.
Only liberty went out of stock, as it had before The Wall, except this time, no one noticed, no one cared. No one tore down a billboard.
The West was not to blame; it did not invent advertising. The oldest billboard, found in Egypt, is 3,000 years old. Gutenberg could not be blamed either for inventing the printing press, Senefelder for the lithography that enabled mass, colored posters. Nor the industrial revolution, capitalism, trade, extractive colonial policies, production lines, free markets, competition, consumption-driven economies, GDP…
Neither in itself, none alone. All for sale. Buy more, get more free.
Once upon a time, late in the second century A.D., a man in a piazza in Oenoanda put up his own billboard. An advertisement for a garden, lush with fruits and vegetables, tended to by friends who were also scientists, artists, philosophers. Who made music and love and conversation freely and simply, on summer evenings tempered by a mild Mediterranean breeze.
Diogenes of Oenoada was describing a real place: the garden had once existed just outside the road to Athens. Between 307 and 306 B.C., it had been where Epicurus had founded a community whose purpose … was to be happy.
“Pleasure is the beginning and the goal of a happy life.”
– Epicurus
And pleasure, he believed, required only three items:
Friendship, freedom, and reflection.
“Send me a little pot of cheese, that, when I like, I may have a feast,”
With someone I love
and some time
to notice how creamy and rich it is: this texture, this conversation, this moment of my existence.
Happiness is,
To love and be loved in good times and bad, for both, for all, are certain;
To belong without depending; lift and be uplifted; forge bonds, not be tied by them;
To explore the world, out and in; to think, to learn, understand, seek, love, grow, constantly every day.
That will not fit on a billboard.
Friends, freedom, and thought. Those are never on sale, but do not have to be. Friends are free, freedom a choice, an examined life just a way of living.
I used to own one of those diaries. Sky blue, or pastel green. I will search for the key. I recall an entry about a picnic. Seine, baguette, brie.