This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

I had that sickening feeling in what they say is your stomach but is in fact your soul.

Moylan had all the tools of rhetoric. If you stayed in school past the age of twelve you learned them then. Things like Johnson’s Letter to Chesterfield or various bits of Swift were taught, you knew your clauses and subclauses and had homework parsing sentences. You knew everything from alliteration, allusion, amplification, analogy and anaphora (‘If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh?’ I could recite every speech of Shylock’s once. God bless the day) to metonyms and metaphors, oxymorons and similes. After Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres, the next thing you learned in Latin was non solo sed etiam. What I’m saying is, it was foundational, and admired, the bit of flourish. On Moylan went, letting fly with antanagoge (‘This heater is not as beautiful as your fire, but it puts out more kilowatts’), enumeratio (‘The motor, the pump and the drum, all the very latest’) and epizeuxis (‘Power, power, power’).

Moylan said the first law of engineering was to make the world a better place. (He didn’t state the second law, that without exception everything that was engineered would one day break down, that sometime, and usually one day after each machine had become indispensable to living, that machine would abnegate all responsibility and not turn on, you’d press its red button and it would just sit there looking at you, and you’d press the button a second time as though excusing it that one time it had forgotten its job and forgotten that its whole purpose was to serve this one simple function, and you’d press the red button or throw the switch and an absolute nothing would happen, a less-than-nothing, a minus action because it would seem you were in a worse-off place than nothing happening because now not only had you forgotten how you lived before but you had to find a service man, and while some part of you always realised that you were living in the forgotten edge of nowhere you didn’t have the hard proof until you tried to find a service man to come to Faha. Where? Oh there might be one coming next week, definitely the week after that, or the one following, and, as it slowly dawned on you that to make his journey worthwhile the same individual was waiting for more machines to break down, you kept pressing the red button because maybe today after the bit of a rest you never know it might turn on, and when it didn’t, when you’d tried the pressing combined with a small shove, w...

boreen,

lambent

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. This was more or less the philosophy of Tess Grogan, who, well into her nineties, kept the finest garden in Faha. We lost a garden, she’d say, speaking of the time of Adam like it wasn’t so long ago, pressing gently the swollen joints of her arthritic fingers and smiling the sagacious smile of the nonagenarian, ‘We lost a garden, our whole lives we have to remake it.’

You understand nothing in the time when it’s happening. I’ve decided that’s a fair creed to live by. Most of the time you don’t estimate the good or the bad you do and you have to operate on a small and labouring engine of hope with a blind windscreen and pray you’re going in a direction that not’s too far off good intention.

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.

I think of that often. We can all pause right here, raise our heads, take a breath and accept that This is happiness,

Beneath the pinholed heaven, the night was God-dimensioned and monumental before electric light.

We all feel we are originals, maybe at the moment when we are most universal.

Charlie Troy led the Resistance against the wearing of glasses. A pure and breathtaking vanity combined I think with a low appreciation of the value of clarity, founded perhaps on the looks of men thereabouts, none of whom came close to the idols of the silver screen.

As with the church, the cinema was full well before starting time, and as with the church, those who refused to surrender to clocks proved their singularity by coming in their own time. This accounted for the first of the usher’s duties, which was a loaves-and-fishes job of making enough seats to go around.

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.

Sin has no opening or closing hours, was Father Coffey’s chilling dictum. To have any chance of a fair fight, neither should the mother church.

I went into St Cecelia’s that night not to pray that Annie Mooney would recover. I knew she would not, and Doctor Troy knew it and she knew it too. I went because grief has to find a home, has to find a place to settle, or the dark wings will overwhelm you and you will fall down in the road. I went into St Cecelia’s because when you come face-to-face with suffering you have to negotiate.

We all have our own reasons, most of which are subterranean, for wanting to try and do something.

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.

I was grateful then to have the prayers in me. There have been times throughout my life when I’ve felt the same, that because of my childhood and education the prayers were things available to me, and I suppose there are few lives that don’t encounter moments when all that is available is drawn down and clung to.

the more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round. Which, in some ways I suppose, is what I’m trying to do here.

The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer. There is no way to get there, except this way. And I am reconciled to that. You live long enough you understand prayers can be answered on a different frequency than the one you were listening for. We all have to find a story to live by and live inside, or we couldn’t endure the certainty of suffering. That’s how it seems to me.

And so, because, at the end, we all go back to the beginning, because of the enduring example of Christy telling his story down the line to Annie, because after more than sixty years my mind is back in that place among those people from whom I took the lesson of how to be a fully alive human being, I will carry on here, carry on through the electric pulses of this machine to tell the one story we all have, the one we’ve lived.

And it did not matter that all of this would pass, that’s what occurred to me. It didn’t matter this time and place would be gone, that these feelings would go to the place of all feelings once pure and complete. It didn’t matter that Sophie and Charlie and Ronnie Troy would slip out of my life, and Christy and Annie Mooney, and then Ganga and Doady, that all of them would be gone but be like remembered music or the amassed richness of a lived life. Because at that moment I understood that this in miniature was the world, a connective of human feeling, for the most part by far pulsing with the dream of the betterment of the other, and in this was an invisible current that, despite faults and breakdowns, was all the time being restored and switched back on and was running not because of past or future times but because, all times since beginning and to the end, the signal was still on, still pulsing, and still trying to love.