The Boston globe had an interesting article today on the results of a study which have just been published in British Medical Journal. Among the conclusions, “A happy friend who lives within a mile boosts your odds of being happy by 25 percent, researchers found…A happy sibling within the same distance increases your probability of happiness by 14 percent. It seems obvious that your closest friends might influence your mood, but the study found that even the happiness of a friend's friend boosts your chance of being happy by 9.8 percent. Even more surprising, the happiness of a friend of a friend of a friend boosts your chance of being happy by 5.6 percent.”
What struck me more than these statistics, which may fail to take into account many other factors, was the way they were framed in the article, beginning “Happiness ripples well beyond a person's inner circle of friends and family” and by the coauthor of the study and a professor of medical sociology at Harvard Medical School who said "It's like there are emotional stampedes that ripple across this infinite fabric of humanity." The image of happiness rippling made dry statistics suddenly seem to be a pool of deep information worth pondering.
Bending the words of William Carlos Williams, it is difficult to get poems from the news, but people are sadly under-informed from not trying to.And maybe, in fact, it’s not as hard as was claimed to get the news from poems, as long as we define news as not just a dry cataloging of events and statistics, but a deep reporting of the human condition and experience. Information, by itself, is inert and of no use; what matters are the truths that are deduced. Many are proved wrong or revised, but some, perhaps like the idea that happiness ripples (like water, like laughter), remain beyond dispute.
There is a plethora of news that’s clearly political, but it would be great to see some news that readers here consider to be clearly poetical.
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