This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

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.