For Some There Will Be No Serenity
When it comes to finding Serenity, there’s one catch. You must be able to find it.
Mal Reynolds fits that profile. After participating in a failed war of independence he wasn’t imprisoned or held in a camp. He was free to come and go as he pleased, so he bought a firefly class ship and flew around the galaxy.
But imagine he had been held indefinitely as a political prisoner or confined to a solitary cell. What if he was sentenced to decades in hard labor with no hope of escape. What would he do then?
Many people will be in that kind of situation in the sense that for them, there will be no Serenity.
Recently I came across the 1993 film Swing Kids depicting an underground cultural movement in 1930s Germany composed of young, upper-class Germans who swing danced, dressed like Anglos, and spoke English in defiance of Nazi cultural preferences. The movie is mediocre overall, but it still packs a few emotional punches.
FILM SPOILER ALERT
One of the most compelling scenes in the movie (and one of my personal favorites of any film, for the time being) is at the end where the main character Peter is at a dance hall. At this point his life is in shambles. His father has already died after being tortured by the Gestapo for political dissent, his mother now plans to marry a Gestapo officer, his close friend and fellow swing kid has committed suicide out of despair at the state of the country, while another has become a fanatical member of the Hitler Youth.
In the ending scene Peter is dancing by himself, which symbolizes his isolation (compared to prior scenes where he’s dancing with women his age) and to a song that perfectly conveys the bitter sweetness mood of the moment. He’s at a place that’s supposed to help him escape the ugliness of the outside world and bring him joy through swing dancing – his own physical “Serenity,” if you will – but the problem is that what brought him happiness wasn’t the dancing or the dance halls, per se. It was the relationships and social context, all of which are now gone permanently. He knows by then the damage is done.
You must know German history to fully appreciate the fatalism of this scene. It’s very likely for Peter there is nothing hopeful in the future. He’s carted off during a police raid of the dance hall; many swing kids were sent to concentration camps.
Or, he’s forced to put on a soldier’s uniform and fight. Look up the German casualty figures for World War 2 to know his odds.
And then even if he survives the war, what if he finds himself in east Germany? He’ll be living in yet another dystopian hell for another 40-something years.
Mind you, that’s if he survives what transpires between 1939-1945.
Why can’t such a person find Serenity?
Serenity is about giving up hope for a future that will never be, discovering what you really want, and going for it.
But it has to be what you really want.
In Swing Kids, all Peter wanted to do was hang out with friends and swing dance; he likely had limited goals in this regard. He was not politically active or had axes to grind. There’s perhaps a strong message the movie implies – in authoritarian regimes, being apolitical won’t save you because everything is political, even down to aesthetics.
But there’s another takeaway. What you really want in life may not be achievable. Maybe it never was, or perhaps it’s too late. Like trying to save up for retirement at age 60 or wanting to be a mountain climber after a horrific accident leaves them with a broken body.
It’s important to distinguish this from Serenity, which rejects false hopes for the future. Too often, our false hopes are placed in things beyond what we really want. We confuse the two, and it’s only through searching ourselves we can differentiate. Sometimes, we can reject a false future but also accept that what we really want in life isn’t attainable.
My friend Aaron Clarey has touched on this in several of his books regarding dating and marriage. He’s received some flak for the profoundly somber premises they’re based on, especially the latter on marriage and family, but I’ve yet to come across someone who’s explained why his conclusions are flawed or incorrect (his solutions are a separate thing). Cappy does his homework.
His books can effectively be summarized by this essay’s title: for some there will be no Serenity, if by that it means marriage and children. What he offers are ways of finding comfort is lesser hopes that keep the fire inside us burning. It’s the equivalent of Shukhov in A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich taking joy in getting extra soup during mealtime or staying healthy while imprisoned in the Siberian gulag. No doubt what he really wanted was freedom, but since that wasn’t on the menu he went for what was available.
Not to sound too dark, but for people without any hope of Serenity, it’s best that such destruction to their dreams is so clear, so obvious, that there is no room for self-deluding. There’s no doubting what is and what isn’t. Better to acknowledge it and seek out smaller comforts than spend a lifetime searching for something you’ll never find.