This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

I know it seems unlikely that Faha then might have been the place to learn how to live, but in my experience the likely is not in God’s lexicon.

its doors are shielded by caution and fear of the corrosive nature of nostalgia. And because I’m antique myself now, aware that by the mercy of creation the soonest thing to evaporate in memory is hardship and rain, I understand that between then and now, as between mystery and meaning, there’s maybe too great a gap, and in the world you’re living, this one, the one where it stopped raining in Faha on the Wednesday of Holy Week, might be too far, too remote in time and manner for you to enter.

The known world was not so circumscribed then nor knowledge equated with facts. Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere.

The roads out the country were not tarred yet, some not even gravelled. The one outside my grandparents’ house was mud, tramped hard and soft and hard and soft again, it was foot- and wheel- and hoof-made and bowed upwards in its centre like a spine along which pulsed the townland, passing the open doors, and in that passing picking up and dropping off those pieces of news by which a place is made vital.

One of the privileges of living in a place forgotten is the preservation of individuality.

Father Coffey, the curate, was young then, and in vocational love with his new parish. Pale and thin as a Communion wafer, he was addicted to the Wilkinson Sword and shaved to the blood vessels. He had the raw look of a trainee saint and the glossy eyes of those in combat with their own blood.

I lived in a profound loneliness at the time. I am not sure why or how it happens that a person finds themselves on the margin of life, but there I was. I was the opposite of surefooted. I couldn’t get any purchase on the ground and was unable to see how to belong anywhere.

A short and almost perfectly round man with eyes always near to laughter and tufted hair that sat like a small wig on a football, Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation.

Generosity to visitors was a helpless affliction in west Clare, and though this was a time of desolation in the west when houses were emptying and on roads lingered the sorrow of a departing people, Making the Welcome remained a kind of constitutional imperative.

We sat on the train going nowhere. It continued going there for some time. At last, Mother Acquin, who considered patience an overrated virtue, pulled me up by the arm and we got off the train and marched down the platform.

I suppose in all childhoods there are pockets where you discover freedom.

It was where you lived by the clock of your stomach, came back to the house only when you were hungry, ate whatever was put before you, and ran out again, only partly aware of the privilege of solitude and the gift of time.

It was where, when darkness fell, it fell absolutely, and when you went outside the wind sometimes drew apart the clouds and you stood in the revelation of so many stars you could not credit the wonder and felt smaller in body as your soul felt enormous.

Some people understand the privilege of stillness and can sit and breathe and look and hear and smell the world turning and let what’s next wait the while.

Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say. It can’t be explained, only felt. He was easy in himself. Maybe that was the first thing. He didn’t feel the need to fill the quiet and had the confidence of the storyteller when the story is still unpacked, its snaps not yet released.

The suitcase, on the ground in front of him, was a kind popular then when journeys were few and one or two transits were all the lifetime expected of them. It was a little more than cardboard, a lot less than leather, of what had once been a tan colour but from sunlight or rain was now a paling mustard. It was small enough, maybe for no more than a single change of clothes, and like all the rest of him it had mileage put on.

So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there’s another way of seeing things.

At the time you’re living it you can sometimes think your life is nothing much. It’s ordinary and everyday and should be and could be in this or that way better. It is without the perspective by which any meaning can be derived because it’s too sensual and urgent and immediate, which is the way life is to be lived. We’re all, all the time, striving, and though that means there’s a more-or-less constant supply of failure, it’s not such a terrible thing if you think that we keep on trying. There’s something to consider in that.

Story was the stuff of life, and to realise you were inside one allowed you to sometimes surrender to the plot, to bear a little easier the griefs and sufferings and to enjoy more fully the twists that came along the way.

May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.

Master Quinn proposed Mrs Reidy as minute-keeper and, though already doing so, she observed the niceties by feigning surprise and honour and agreeing with a single nod of the immovable curls while dipping the nib in the ink to note her own appointment. The election completed as rehearsed the night before in the Parochial House,

‘Missus,’ Christy greeted Bubs brightly. Bubs’s eyelashes lowered to half and came up again. ‘Two bottles of stout.’ Bubs didn’t move. ‘You’re the electrics,’ she said. ‘That’s right.’ She had the smallest eyes. They were bedded into a lumpen head, and not it nor any other part of her had moved an inch as she considered him. ‘I’m not wanting it,’ she said. Then she smiled. There are better smiles on deflated footballs. ‘I signed but I’m not wanting it now.’

It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end. So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic.

It seems to me, there was little culture of complaint then. I may be wrong here, but in my thinking hardship had been part of history for so long it had become a condition of life. There was no expectation things could, or would, be otherwise. You got on with it, and through faith, family and character accommodated as best you could whatever suffering and misfortune was yours.

I saw them but did not remember for fifty years until I saw a figure pixelate on a screen. The moths of Easter, I said aloud, and they flew in memory and dissolved again the way the smallest things of your life do.

Many were the houses of a people who lived outdoors at the time, a thing I didn’t consider, nor how the electricity would change the habits of centuries.

Neighbours, as Jesus knew, can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone’s Christianity.

Women enjoy watching men work, the same way men enjoy watching women dance. There’s otherness and mystery in it.

While in Faha the dictionary of rain ran to many volumes, it was quickly apparent that for sunshine there was only a single phrase: it was roasting.

When your spirit is uneasy, stillness can be a kind of suffering. And when you’re young, the unlived life in you, all that future, urgent and unreachable, can be unbearable.

I write this now, having spent a lifetime trying to be, by which I mean the best version, a thing dreamed by those stricken with imagination. Not that you ever quite know what that is, still there he is, that better man, who remains always just ahead of you. I write this now, having come to realise it’s a lifelong pursuit, that once begun will not end this side of the graveyard. With this I have made an old man’s accommodation and am reconciled to the fruits of a fruitless endeavour. I don’t torture myself with my failures, but when I was seventeen I did little else.

All of the small decisions of my life have been led by reason, but none of the important ones,

It was one of the wonders of Faha that Mrs Moore remained above ground.

That was one of the things about him. He walked this line between the comic and the poignant, between the certainly doomed and the hopelessly hopeful. In time I came to think it the common ground of all humanity.

This life is full of hurts and heals, we bruise off each other just by living, but the hope is some days we realise it.

and the time-worn truth that the stomachs of growing children can never be full.

They spun and stepped, dancing with each other in loose embrace, their faces flush with faraway looks and their feet like a native clockwork, slipping them free for now of all hardship and chores, stepping them into that elsewhere from which all music takes its origins.

And when they did, the air was changed. There’s no other way to say it. The smoky, dark corner of a dingy pub forgot that it was a nowhere. It became a locus, a centre, and we became a company, focused around tables where, behind abandoned butts smoking in ashtrays and pint glasses paused in mid-tide, two fiddles, a flute and a concertina made time stretch so it was now and back across the ages in the same moment.

Still, this was Faha versus Boola, and once the ball was thrown in, the players forgot their antiquity.

By mid-afternoon the July sun that shines in the memories of grandfathers was in April attendance at Mulvey’s field.

The episode of the dawn singing was not discussed until after the game, when it made its way sideways into the talk, first by way of Kitty Meade who with vividness, exactitude and dramatic pause described to Dympna Fennel in Bourke’s what she had not witnessed, and then by Dympna who, in telling Cissie Casey, added the flourish of Christy’s dropping on one knee and sweeping from his head a straw hat.

And in all the times you replay that instant you can’t quite believe the simplicity of it, the unannounced arrival of calamity on an ordinary day in the ordinary street, and in all those times you make the move you didn’t make to save her, it’s just a shudder, a spasm of rescue that’s in the pulse of humanity but in the dream version you do make it, you push aside the idiot embarrassment you’re feeling and you reach out a hand that can’t save her from crashing on to the path, but you reach it and maybe sometimes you jump forward and you get your whole body in the way to break the fall so that your mother and you fall together on to the cold indifferent concrete of Harcourt Street and her head does not go crack like that, crack, so sharp, so violent and unexpected that in the same instant your stomach turns and you vomit in fierce convulsions as if a foulness is being pumped up out of where you knew it always was, and there’s nothing you can do, because now here it is, here is how the world goes, your mother fallen and you throwing up but keeping your head forward to save your new secondary-school shoes.

There was no reason to suppose the fine weather had only come for Easter, but if reason accounted for all that human beings did the history of the world would be a straightforward telling.

And because old men no longer need adhere to the convention of time, and because memory dissolves it, I can be there still. I can be sat on the grass at our lesser picnic on the top of Master Quinn’s field and feel the sun striking down and know something of the peace of that pause, the dawning that opens in a person, which is not yet at the point of understanding, not yet anything solid or sure as a thought, but happens in a way that you may not realise until years later and miles away when it comes to you that just then, just there, you were brushed with nothing less than eternity, catching a sense of a place that has been before you and will be after you, and both were contained in that moment.

The thing about Doady’s brownbread is when you take a bite of it you’ve taken a bite out of the elements, earth, air, fire and water all, and while your mouth negotiates with the grainy dryness now made a ball by the moisture of the butter, while you realise that by an alchemy of bakery the lump of the bread in your mouth is bigger than it seemed in your hand, keep chewing, and that there’s nothing you can do now because you’re getting a first-hand practical demonstration of what Duns Scotus called Thisness, keep chewing, the dense solid mass of the undeniable, you can say nothing for a bit.

Arnold had no experience in courtship. He had put it aside in the dry years of study in Dublin, and it had put him aside after that.

and because I loved you once is among the saddest lines in humanity.

I was prepared. From the readings of melodramatic novels, words of ballads, and the things your mind makes up when it has no knowledge of real human beings, I had imagined all outcomes, wore a nineteenth-century cloak of black velvet and had my full set of responses to try and help Christy’s cause. But I lost them all now in the face of this actual woman and what she said next.

There were sun sprays and oils, not to protect, but to help penetrate and make last the look of burnt freckle that was translated locally as tan.