Are you happy?

The Curzon cinema in Oxford had a rare screening last week of a 1968, black-and white documentary entitled Inquiring Nuns, in which two nuns visited churches, shops, museums and other public places in Chicago and asked people whether they were happy. It was followed by a Skype Q and A with the director, who was very happy at the attention the film was getting fifty years after it was initially released, a state of mind that did not seem to be dampened by the fact that there were only about eleven of us there.

‘What makes you unhappy?’ the nuns asked on the thirty foot screen in front of me and across the span of history I wanted to shout back ‘Two of the eleven people here who are polluting the light with the little tiny screens on their mobile phones and thus not allowing themselves or the people around them to focus fully on what is happening on the huge screen in front of us.’ Why do people do that? Switch off your phones in the cinema people! I might have tweeted about it afterwards, but there are too many people already in the world going online to treat minor transgressions as major diplomatic incidents, people intolerantly waging a war of words in which the only truth is their own sense of vociferous, self-important rightness. Looking at Twitter tonight, I am reminded of the words of Mark Twain, that flash up in the opening shot of another film, The Big Short. “It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

The people interviewed fifty years ago for Inquiring Nuns were not afflicted by a strong sense of their own rightness and that alone made it a refreshing change to modern social media. The men and women on the streets of Chicago, outside churches, in shops and museums, were the kind of people who read opinion pieces in newspapers and could engage with different perspectives. Indeed, one of the things that struck me was that this was a movie in which quite a lot of people seemed at ease with the idea of not having made up their minds on some of the issues of the day. Not making up your mind is bad form if you’re in a restaurant and the ingredients in the meal you haven’t ordered yet are in danger of going past the use-by date, but in other contexts it might be appropriate and even liberating. I suspect that most of the people in this film had not really made their minds up whether they were happy because happiness is not really an endpoint, despite the way fairy tales always end, but an emotion arising out of something else. Happiness is never the point, but when you encounter it, you might well smile, unless you belong to one of those very strict religious sects in which smiling is frowned upon as a sign of being fickle and worldy and liable to lead to laughter.

Inquiring Nuns is definitely a portrait of 60s America that is too respectably middle-class and that might to some extent account for the sense I had that many of the interviews had a public voice that they were expressing that was far removed from their private voice. This was particularly the case in scenes in or near churches. Were the nuns really drawing out what people thought or only what people thought they were supposed to think? Did I really write that last sentence with any expectation that another person would be able to understand it without reading it at least twice?

Of course I can be critical of this separation of the public and private in Inquiring Nuns but there’s also something charming about it. That world of respectability also has a certain respect about it, where people are referred to as Mr, Miss or Mrs, hats are tipped and men still wear suits with the folded handkerchief in the pocket, something I have never done but which is now an ambition.

Are you happy? Is your answer to that question confident or wary and has it changed for the better or worse whilst you have been reading this? Is it an easy, hard, or downright irrelevant question? If it was a nun asking you that question (or me dressed as a nun) would that change the way you answered?

For my next service at Cheltenham on June 30th I am going to be inviting people to explore their own happiness. Are you happy? What makes you happy? Are there different types of happiness? If you are able to come along, feel free to bring an object, memory, reading or anything else that says something about happiness.

In the meantime, feel the sunshine, taste your food, hug a friend, appreciate a joke. And in the words of Dr Seuss, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”