This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

All these squalls to which we have been subjected are signs that the weather will soon improve and things will go well for us, because it is not possible for the bad or the good to endure forever, and from this it follows that since the bad has lasted so long, the good is close at hand. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

they and the rain had been married so long they no longer took notice of each other.

grandfathers have few privileges and the knowledge of your own redundancy has a keen tooth.

Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

In the fields the cattle, made slow-witted by the rain, lifted their rapt and empty faces, heavy loops of spittle hanging, as though they ate watery light.

Sam Cregg, whose clock ran slow, in fact and metaphor,

I 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?

As a shield against despair she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived.

never said the Good Lord without just a hint of irony,

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.

during the Second World War Ireland fell out of synch with the world. The British, with breathtaking command, introduced something called Double Summertime, putting the clocks two hours forward to enable a longer working day. The Irish did not, and in fact Dublin was, is, and will always be twenty-five minutes and twenty-one seconds behind Greenwich,

Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them.

It seems to me the true and individual nature of a human being’s eyes defy description, or at least my capabilities. They’re not like anything else, or anyone else’s, and may be the most perfect proof of the existence of a Creator.

I’m at an age now when in the early mornings I’m often revisited by all my own mistakes, stupidities and unintended cruelties. They sit around the edge of the bed and look at me and say nothing. But I see them well enough.

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.

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.

It said Here’s a heart aching, and that ache was large enough, urgent and familiar enough, for you all to feel it and by feeling participate in something you yourself were either too timid, closed or unlucky to have known personally, or had known in the long ago of your own innocence over which you had since grown the skin necessary to tolerate the loss and stay living.

banjaxed.

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

As though parked there by flying Persians, mats and carpets were lying about the yard.

the sun made actual all metaphors and, if not quite the pallid brightness of Jerusalem, to those with the deep and untroubled well of Doady’s conviction, it must have seemed as though this year the Father Himself was setting the scene for the drama of the Son.

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.

It was already certain to be a remarkable day. But that was inseparable from the temporality of it: it won’t last, fortune never did.

Betraying a caustic he had absorbed from the Brothers in Limerick, he had told the crews the best way to solve any disputes was shame. ‘So, ye want to be behind the times, is that it? That’s what you tell ’em.’ This was a tricky one, on three grounds. First, being behind the times was not the spur it might have been to a townie, who maybe lived within the illusion that they were not in a backwater on a salted rock in the middle of the Atlantic. Faha knew it was not only behind the times, but much further back than that, it was outside the times altogether, And what of it? Second, there was the question of unworthiness. This had been ingrained by the Church from birth. With recourse to a pure Aristotelian logic, the bishops understood that making people feel lesser was a way of making the Almighty mightier, and with native extremism Faha took that to new lows. If there was something good out there, we probably didn’t deserve it, was the basic position. Cormac Tansey, of course, went further: if there was something bad out there, he deserved that. The whole notion of unworthiness began to disappear, coincidental with the Church, by the approach of the millennium. But then it was absolute. And finally, farmers, with the natural caution of those who lived within the uncertainties of season and the brevity of life cycles, understood that of the land they were custodians only, and so change was always to be resisted.

het up,

moidered

it seems to me every life has a few gleaming times, times when things were brighter, more intense and urgent, had more life in them I suppose.

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

We played the way all card games were played in Faha, not to make money, but to pass the time, provide a way to escape reality and by the happenstance of chance allow someone to believe good fortune existed.

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.

When you’ve been raised inside a religion, it’s not a small thing to step outside it. Even if you no longer believe in it, you can feel its absence. There’s a spirit-wound to a Sunday. You can patch it, but it’s there, whether natural or invented not for me to say.

The quiet of the country can sit on your heart like a stone.

One of the things about Irish music is how one tune can enter another. You can begin with one reel, and with no clear intention of where you will be going after that, but halfway through it will sort of call up the next so that one reel becomes another and another after that, and unlike the clear-edged definitions of songs, the music keeps linking, making this sound-map even as it travels it, so player and listener are taken away and time and space are defeated. You’re in an elsewhere. Something like that. Which, I suppose, is both my method and aim in telling this story too.

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.

but she did have an extraordinary long thick wave of brown hair and the kind, sad eyes some women have looking at a small child when they’ve had none.

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. In the mid-distance birds landing and lifting that were the same birds since forever and would be forever, and you in that forever too, sitting on the dry grass of a hill field in Faha aware that your whole life is an instant, knowing it for what it is, and so too then knowing something of the deep sleep of the fields, the smile of spring and what mercy there is in a fall of sunlight.

It seems an obvious point now, but I hadn’t lived long enough to know there’s an infinity of ways to tell the same story, that human failure is a history without end, but so too human endeavour, and that between both lies the lot of the living.

Doing the Christian thing, I was to realise, was maybe only achieved by Christ.

A story grows in the gaps where the facts fall short. And maybe, in extravagant weather, grows faster.

and it’d be as when you are returned to a moment buried in the first corner of your heart, returned to a feeling that pierced you once so profoundly that just to survive the loss required everything you had, just to breathe, just to go about in the broken world in the pretence of the ordinary,

The sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the Irish are not improved by sunshine,

collogue

regret the scorn. It’s an acid vice of the high-minded.

Whatever the actual formula for success in hostelry, by necessity Penniworth’s version required that no funds be spent on the building or facilities. The hotel responded with a diva’s tactic of theatrically falling apart.

gin-soaked games of bridge that were played not according to Hoyle’s,

Once he got going, my grandfather’s way of telling a story was to go pell-mell, throwing Aristotle’s unities of action, place and time into the air and in a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth.

They each had their reasons for believing me alive, Ganga, because through shallowness or depth, he believed the world will always try and fall right side up, and Doady, because Intercession of the Saints was available to Kerry people.