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Instructions for a Happier Life
combines instructions for living well with bold, colourful pictograms like those used in international instruction manuals.
Learn To Love Rain
commends stoicism: finding peace, if not happiness, through the acceptance of what cannot be changed. References to rain recur many times in the artist’s writings around this time.
Wealth of unguessed-at proportions, rain, the sudden coming of rain, the breaking of the season, the season of waiting, broken. Rain. Blown in from the North Atlantic. The first drenching rains of September.
Rain appears as a metaphor for sexual gratification:
That great summer of absence, the long dry summer of your absence, longing for rain - for sudden release from this heat, dryness.
The artist recalls many instances from childhood in which rain seemed an uncannily sympathetic natural element; for example, rain on the first day of school and the rhythmic sweep of the windscreen wipers beating in sympathy with the apprehension aroused by the occasion.
Rain, gloomy afternoons, rain at the windows, a kind of exhaustion. Rain has always been connected in my mind with kindness.
Learn To Love Rain
can be read as a reference to the Buddhist ideal that ‘you can only get so wet’. Surrendering to the rain (or any difficulty), rather than resisting it, sets one free.
A contemporaneous entry in the artist's journal underscores the work's importance:
The first instruction for a happier life ‘Learn to love rain’ is the apotheosis of what I have been trying to achieve - it is absolutely condensed, it is given in simple direct language, it is easy to understand, it’s meaning goes on for practically ever and it appears in public (in a popular enough form but without compromising the point of it).
Journal entry 20.10.01
