We’ve lost our ability to take comfort in small things.
Recently I have been forced to think a bit about happiness. It’s not something I’ve done before. I have been too busy living. But when an interview with me appeared in The Sunday Times under the headline “Why ‘This Is Happiness’ Author Niall Williams Is Happily Out of Step,” I began to realize that it was not just me but the idea of happiness itself that was out of step with the times, and that it required some mental adjusting, not to say daring, to say aloud the title of my novel.
“How can you be happy now?” the book seems to ask, and it has a point. The catastrophe of climate neglect, the toxic politics, the tangible sense of so many things worsening in your own lifetime, along with a sense of your obscure or outright complicity, all combined to make the idea of any possible happiness seem at best childish, at worse willfully blind. “This Is Unhappiness” seemed a truer epitaph for the times, a sentiment echoed by the recent No. 1 movie in the world, “Joker,” which includes the line, “I haven’t been happy one minute of my life,” with an expletive thrown in for good measure.
Now, some element of being happily out-of-step may come from the fact that for nearly 35 years, my wife, Christine, and I have been living, writing and trying to grow a garden on the outermost edge of Europe, in Kiltumper, on the west coast of Ireland. I don’t mean to suggest that from this green vantage we are impervious to what is going on; we are not. In general, thanks largely to a superb national broadcaster, I find that Irish people are very well-informed.
So, being out-of-step is not from ignorance, nor is Kiltumper an idyll. Then again, no one who has reached their 60s can avoid the gathering evidence of their own mortality. And for the past four years we have been in and out of the cool, spirit-crushing corridors of an oncology ward, since Christine was first diagnosed with stage-three bowel cancer.
So, happiness? Really?
A first defense might come from the wonderful Wendell Berry, who in “Think Little,” a canonical essay from nearly 50 years ago, wrote, “A person who is growing a garden, if he is growing it organically, is improving a piece of the world.” So, in sometimes coming close to despairing of the earth with a capital E, we have focused on the portion with a small e that we are charged with minding, the piece, literally, within our bounds.
All gardens are asking for attention all the time, and the return for that attention is to gift you an essential now, the present moment, where you are face to face with the nature of things. Lest that sound too grand, or abstract, what I mean is the very opposite. There is nothing abstract about the heavy clay growing heavier in the blown rain of Kiltumper, and nothing too grand in “Niall, we need to de-caterpillar the kale now.”
But there is a kind of happiness.
I can appreciate that at the beginning of a country — and one as vast and empty as America was — the idea of pursuit, both chase and hunt, of happiness had an invigorating appeal to the founding fathers. (I’m not sure the founding mothers would have phrased it the same way.) But the truth is that the longer I have lived, and the shorter my future, the less pursuing I have done. Some of this may come from a peculiarly Irish positive pessimism — be happy, things will get worse — more of it from the history of disappointment all artists know and the rest from a remnant Catholic guilt that says you don’t deserve happiness anyway. The point is, in my case, happiness seemed a thing that could not be pursued, only realized and chosen.
I found some echo of this in Stephanie Burt’s recent essay in The New Yorker about Seamus Heaney, where she writes of his becoming the happiest poet of his generation. Having been a poet of earth and water in his early career, later he “became a poet of air: one who wanted to share with his readers” the feeling of “lightness, the ability to stay pleased.” And from the poem “The Gravel Walks,” she quotes the line that has been inscribed on his headstone: “Walk on air against your better judgment.”
I love the daring and defiance in that, the wonder and the gravity balanced. It is not coincidence that it comes from a collection called “The Spirit Level.” With a clear eye, your better judgment sees the world as it is today, and yet chooses to be, as I am literally these days, lightheaded.
The final defense of happiness comes from Michael Dooley.
When I came to write the new novel, I remembered a moment from our early days in Clare. We had left commuter Monday-to-Friday lives in New York to come to a rural farming community, seeking a simpler life that was truer to our natures, not yet knowing what exactly that was. Christine’s grandfather had grown up in Kiltumper and left it 70 years earlier to go to New York, so there was a root buried there. In those first heady days, we were welcomed in particular by the older people, and by trial and error were taught the lessons of how to live here.
One of those first welcomers was Michael Dooley, a silver-haired farmer, turf cutter, man of the land of the old kind, who into his 80s, pedaled his big bicycle into the village.
Because Michael seemed to be working on the land all day every day, into the fall of darkness and beyond, and never complained, I once asked him if he ever took a holiday.
“A holiday?” He looked at me like the innocent I was.
“I mean, what do you do to be happy?”
The question was a novelty to him and he considered it from all sides before answering.
“When I want a holiday,” he said at last, “I go over the road as far as the meadow. I go in there, take off my jacket, and lay down on it. I watch the world turning for a bit, with me still in it.”
He smiled then, and held me in his blue Atlantic eyes, full of the ordinary wisdom of a well-lived life, a wisdom that saw the many failings of the world but our still breathing and dreaming in it, and with a conclusive nod that defeated all arguments said, “That’s happiness.”
New York Times
