The Mansion of Happiness Read Free Page A

wrote, “even from the gates of heaven.”) Your progress is speeded up by virtue and slowed down by vice. Each stop is a “character.” You begin at the Infant. Whoever dies first wins. Your reward is to become, at eighty-four, the Immortal Man. There are setbacks at every turn, Jñána Chaupár all over again. Land on the Married Man, at the square marked 34 (the thirty-fourth year of your life), and you get to advance to the Good Father, at 56; but land on the Duelist, at 22, and you’ll be sent back to age 3, for acting like a child. There is some slight sense of improvement—the acquisition of wisdom, maybe—not unlike that captured in a proverbBenjamin Franklin once printed in
Poor Richard’s Almanack:
“At 20 years of age the Will reigns; at 30 the Wit; at 40 the Judgment.” 16 The Benevolent Man, age 52, has much to recommend him. Still, there are rogues and knaves all over the board,from the Thoughtless Boy, a ten-year-old, to the Troublesome Companion, at eighty-one. Every age has its folly.
    The New Game of Human Life borrowed its board and rules from the Royal Game of Goose, invented in Florence in the sixteenth century, and one of a class called “spiral race games.” The oldest spiral race game may be theHyena Game, played for centuries by Arabs in Sudan, in a groove traced in the sand with a stick. It involves a race between pebbles representing the players’ mothers, who leave their village and head to a well at the spiral’s center, where they must wash their clothes and return home before a hyena catches them. (A similar game, fromancient Egypt, is known as Hounds and Jackal.) 17 Wallis adapted the spiral race game to the idea that life is a voyage in which travelers are buffeted between vice and virtue. It was this allegory that gave the New Game of Human Life its “UTILITY and MORAL TENDENCY.” Parents were instructed to play with their children and “request their attention to a few moral and judicious observations explanatory of each Character as they proceed & contrast the happiness of a Virtuous & well-spent life with the fatal consequences arriving from Vicious & Immoral pursuits.” The game is a creed: life is a voyage that begins at birth and ends at death,God is at the helm, fate is cruel, and your reward lies beyond the grave. Nevertheless, toPuritans, who considered gambling the work of the devil, playing a game of life was, itself, an immoral pursuit. As the English poet Nathaniel Cotton put it, in 1794:
                   
That life’s a game, divines confess;
                   
This says at cards, and that at chess;
                   
But if our views be center’d here
,
                   
’Tis all a losing game, I fear.
18
    The New Game of Human Life showed up in the United States not long after George Washington was inaugurated, and it was still being played as late as the 1870s; although, by then, an essayist who wrote about it made it sound quaint, an antique game played “on a queer old parchment.” 19 The fearsome hand of providence made the New Game of Human Life, by latter-day board game standards, unbearably dull. There’s no strategy, just dutiful to–ing and fro–ing, in abject obedience to the roll of the die and the rules of the game. Even worse, there’s a dispiriting absence of adversaries; you’re racing against other players, but you’re not competing with them,not the way you are in, say,Monopoly, when you get to charge them exorbitant rents. And, as for parents offering up “a few moral and judicious observations” at each square, I have tried this—giving my best impression of an eighteenth-century father—and all I can say is: no dice. When my six-year-old landed on the Docile Boy, I asked him, “Do you know what ‘docile’ means?”
    “No.”
    “It means you should do what I say, you little blister.”
    “Oh yeah?” He narrowed his eyes. “Your roll.”
    Two more games of life, the