The Grass is Always Greener

Russell Edson’s poem Antimatter offers an innovative representation of a very well established notion. Humanity has long been familiar with the phenomenon experienced when an individual has something, but feels as though he/she might be happier with an alternative thing. This idea has been summed up concisely in the colloquialism: the grass is always greener. In other words, whenever one believes that happiness is just out of reach, they might reconsider that which they are clutching at the present, and perhaps come to the conclusion that what they have is more than enough to evoke happiness.

            The first and last lines of this poem play an especially crucial role in the reconfiguration of this ideal. The poem begins, “On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world,” setting up not only the visual concept of a division between this side and the other, but also using the word inverse to capture the fundamentally backwards nature of Edson’s hypothetical world. In a world where such anomalies as insane people going sane and sunrise occurring at night are the norm, one might consider this arrangement to be completely far fetched. The surprising and revealing truth of the matter is, however, that in a world where every person is insane, one is just as concerned about acquiring sanity as we are of losing it in our world, on our side of the mirror. So, while the picture Edson paints looks to us like a wild concoction of Tim Burton and Salvador Dali, it is truly no more bizarre than our world might seem to a citizen of this inverse society.

            Finally, in the last, and arguably most profound line in Edson poem, we learn, “In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy . . .” To us, a reversion from adulthood into childhood, a loss of all the great benefits of being a cognizant and responsible human, seem very sad indeed. But is it truly any more sad than the exchange of innocence for corruption, the rise from peaceful youth to aggressive age. Without Edson’s unique perspective into a world upside down and backwards in every way, we might be inclined to consider our own situation to be the very happiest a situation can be. When we consider it against our own reality, though, it becomes apparent that life is only what one makes of it. Happiness is achieved only through making the best of one’s circumstances, not attempting to radically alter them for some invented or imagined ideal.