| In 1913, Eleanor H. Porter’s “Pollyanna” was published. In this novel, the orphaned Pollyanna plays the glad game, which means that she’s always looking for something to be thankful for when things go south. These acts of gratitude drew her away from her troubles and allowed her to see the good in the world.
The book and her glad game became a smash hit with adults and young people alike. Glad game clubs were founded across America, and Parker Brothers introduced a popular board game that sold for 50 years. Yet calling someone a Pollyanna today is generally an insult describing an excessively optimistic person who can’t face reality.
Two years after “Pollyanna” appeared, with World War I already taking its wrecking ball to traditional Western culture, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” was published. Here, we find no glad game, but only self-obsession and its companion, despair: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
A creature of doubts and conjectures—“I should have been a pair of ragged claws/Scuttling across the floors of silent seas”—Prufrock is wrapped up in egoism, his energies directed inward, always focused on No. 1. He’s the dreary forerunner of our own sad age of anxiety, discontent, and self-absorption.
In many ways, we stand, you and I, on a spectrum of extremes between Pollyanna and Prufrock. If you’d like to step a little closer to the glad girl and avoid the Prufrock virus, here are four ways to help you make the move.
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