This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

A hundred books could not capture a single village.

Someone has said religion lasted longer in Ireland because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell. And

sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given. At moments you’re aware of it balanced on your tongue, but not what comes next. Something like that. I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you’ve lived this long you must have learned something, so you open your eyes before dawn and think: What is it that I’ve learned, what is it I want to say?

The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my own life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality.

Ganga understood that the ageless remedy for a boy whose mother was ill was to bring him to see the ocean.

the smell of rain in all its iterations, the smell of distant rain, of being about to rain, of recent rain, of long-ago rain, the insipid smell of drizzle, the sweet one of downpour, the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel

A key thing to understand about Ganga was that he loved a story. He believed that human beings were inside a story that had no ending because its teller had started it without conceiving of one, and that after ten thousand tales was no nearer to finding the resolution of the last page. 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. He stepped aside as Doady eyeballed the visitor and shot out: ‘After Easter, they said.’

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

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. So here it was, that quality, that life, in a man singing.

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end.

Pieces of story she would discover intact in her. She would draw them into the air with a single phrase and be elsewhere for a moment, eyes distant and eyelashes winging as an image fleeted past.

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. A thing I didn’t consider then was that he was

a lifelong weakness for fine words and minor chords,

A story grows in the gaps where the facts fall short.

Because I was incapable of inventing a unique behaviour, or the world had used up all its originality, with a sugared irresistibility, all the clichés of lovelorn behaviour stuck to me.

It took me many years to conceive of life as comedy, or tragicomedy anyway. The part I was playing always seemed grave and earnest. I always felt there was something I must do.

Now, as far as I was concerned there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and, until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better.

You understand nothing in the time when it’s happening.

‘This is happiness.’ It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

But I didn’t give it more weight than that then, not yet realising you can turn a corner and find your life waiting there for you, and that if you walked past it, it would come after and keep tapping you on the shoulder.

Maybe I didn’t know it then, I’m pretty sure I didn’t. Didn’t know that there are times in a life that pass but retain a gleaming, which means they never die, and the light of them is in you still. There are many consolations in having a convulsed heart. Among them is being attuned to the music of everyday and awake to all that is shining, stirring, pulsing.

outside, about where the electricity crews were, and about myself, which last made dawn on me that it’s only when someone asks you about yourself that you exist in the fourth dimension of a story. In none of this do I wish to pretend that I was any more assistance to her than anyone else might have been. I know I wasn’t. I know I was each day singed some more by the terrible knowledge that I could not truly help her, that she was dying in the same slow way most people die, minute by minute and day by day.

(Mrs Prendergast on the exchange in the post office had the best vantage and the truest version. She had a telephonist’s intuition and a perfect knowledge of the timbre of secrecy in the human register. In the first three words of any conversation coming over the wire she could tell whether this was one worth listening to. She knew the music of yearning in a human voice, and with the headset on had developed a blind woman’s sensitivity for sound, could listen into and along the wires, and did so now with her eyes closed and all other lines disconnected, leaving behind her body to go elsewhere through her ears, half a century before it would be commonplace.