[In the following essay, Cravens compares themes found in Lin's The Importance of Living with themes found in the works of Émile Chartier, who wrote under the name of Alain.]

After a long bout of chemotherapy, a friend of mine read Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. What struck him was that although Crusoe had suffered a shipwreck and been cast ashore upon an unknown island, he discovered that he had everything there that he required for survival; all he needed to do was to live simply and to make intelligent use of what he had been given. Crusoe's gratitude spilled over into the life of my friend and changed it.

I began to think of other pieces of literature—didactic, perhaps, but not annoyingly so—that shed a beneficial light upon the reader. The first one that came to mind begins:

It is a hot day in June when the sun hangs still in the sky and there is not a whiff of wind or air, nor a trace of clouds; the front and back yards are hot like an oven and not a single bird dares to fly about. Perspiration flows down my whole body in little rivulets. There is the noon-day meal before me, but I cannot take it for the sheer heat. I ask for a mat to spread on the ground and lie down, but the mat is wet with moisture and flies swarm about to rest on my nose and refuse to be driven away. Just at this moment when I am completely helpless, suddenly there is a rumbling of thunder and big sheets of black clouds overcast the sky and come majestically on like a great army advancing to battle. Rain water begins to pour down from the eaves like a cataract. The perspiration stops. The clamminess of the ground is gone. All flies disappear to hide themselves and I can eat my rice. Ah, is this not happiness?

The writer continues:

To cut with a sharp knife a bright green watermelon on a big scarlet plate of a summer afternoon. Ah, is this not happiness?

To keep three or four spots of eczema in a private part of my body and now and then to scald or bathe it with hot water behind closed doors. Ah, is this not happiness?

When a good piece of old porcelain is broken, you know there is no hope of repairing it. The more you turn it about and look at it, the more you are exasperated. I then hand it to the cook, asking him to use it as any old vessel, and give orders that he shall never let that broken porcelain bowl come within my sight again. Ah, is this not happiness?

To see someone's kite line broken. Ah, is this not happiness?

These are the observations of Chin Sheng-t'an, a seventeenth-century Chinese critic best known for his commentaries on the play Western Chamber. Once shut up in a temple for ten days because of rainy weather, he and a friend entertained themselves by counting up the genuinely best times they had experienced. Later Chin wrote his down as “Thirty-Three Happy Moments.” Lin Yutang, a scholar who achieved eminence both in China and the United States, translated the list and published it in 1937 in The Importance of Living, Lin's own testimony of his thought and life. The book, once kept in print for decades by Capricorn and now unavailable except in secondhand bookstores, is a compendium of his favorite writings and quotations as well as his personal philosophy. Thus we get essays like “The Importance of Loafing,” “The Inhumanity of Western Dress,” “On Sitting in Chairs” and “Human Happiness Is Sensuous,” this last containing Chin's happy moments. Lin's happiness is, he says, biological: getting up after a night of perfect sleep and sniffing the morning air and inhaling deeply, looking at the plump legs of his children and hearing their chatter. He describes his joy at going out without an umbrella when he sees a July shower approaching. “I hastily set out to meet the shower halfway across the fields and come home drenched through and through and tell my family that I was simply caught by the rain.” To prove his point, he asks, “Does anybody ever love a woman spiritually without loving her physically?” and insists that the world of spirit, with its delicate emotions, makes itself known to us through the senses.

Attention to physical reality characterizes the viewpoint of another salubrious writer. “Impatience and ill humor sometimes result from the fact that a man has been on his feet too long,” he writes. “Do not try to reason him out of his ill humor; offer him a chair.” And: “As a matter of fact, specific reasons for happiness or unhappiness do not really count; everything depends on our body and its functions.” And: “Pessimism comes from our passions; optimism from the will.”

These aperçus are by a contemporary of Lin Yutang's, a French professor of philosophy named Émile Chartier who wrote under the name of Alain. His specialty was the short journalistic essay, or propos, and he composed thousands of them, keeping them light, spontaneous, shapely and to the point. In 1928, ninety-three propos were published under the title Propos sur le bonheur, which has now been translated by Robert and Jane Cottrell as Alain on Happiness (North-western University Press). Like Lin, Alain delights in the everyday, constantly finding something fresh and wise to say in pieces with titles like “The Art of Yawning,” “The Power of Forgetting,” “A Hymn to Milk” and “Insults.” In “The Art of Being Happy,” he writes:

I should also include some practical advice about making good use of bad weather. At the moment I am writing this, it is raining; there is a patter on the roof; hundreds of little rills are chattering; the air is clean, almost filtered; the storm clouds are like strips of magnificent cloth. One must learn to seize such beauties. “But,” someone says, “rain ruins the harvest.” Another complains: “Mud makes everything dirty.” And still a third: “It's so nice to be able to sit on the grass.” Of course, everyone feels the same way; but your complaining does no good. … Especially in rainy weather one wants to see smiling faces.

Did Lin Yutang and Alain ever meet, or ever read each other? Certainly, they're spiritual twins: relaxed, practical, earthy, good-humored, kind, unobtrusive, able to find the profound in the seemingly superficial and to express it with elegance and without pretension. Each considered the ability to give pleasure to others important, and each managed, despite the chaos of war and revolution, to will into existence apparently happy lives for themselves. “My suspicion is, the reason why we shut our eyes willfully to this gorgeous world, vibrating with its own sensuality, is that the spiritualists have made us plain scared of [the senses],” Lin writes. Alain tells of a soldier he met while stationed at the front in World War I who said, “We're not afraid any more; we're just permanently terrified,” and who later was delighted to discover that he was sick and might have to go to the hospital. “But I could see very well that his joy was curing him,” Alain writes. “During those horrible days, one ends up thinking that it would be very pleasant to die from an illness. Such thoughts are most effective in preventing all illnesses. Joy disposes the body to health better than the most skillful doctor could. There is no longer any fear of being ill, which always worsens health. … It is always good to understand these things, as it is good to understand that it is stiffness, resulting from fear, which makes the horseman fall. There is a kind of insouciance that is a great and powerful ruse.”

In their insouciance, Lin Yutang and Alain are like the man in the ancient tale who escaped from a shipwreck naked and said when he came ashore, “I bear with me my entire fortune.” Neither believes in searching outside oneself for happiness, or searching at all. Lin asks us to open our eyes and ears, and Alain counsels, “When [happiness] seems to be in the future, stop and think about it, for you already have it. To hope is to be happy.”