This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Story was a kind of human binding. I can’t explain it any better than that. There was telling everywhere. Because there were fewer sources of where to find out anything, there was more listening.

There was nothing of the lamb in Mother Acquin. She could have been second choice to command the Allied Forces. She was on her way to take the sea air with the Sisters of Mercy. She’d take all they had, I’d say.

Perhaps because of some primitive but profound allure attached to the tuning or because of the mysterious attractiveness of those even tangential to music, he had a long train of rumoured paramours and illicit relations, all of which were in defiance of his actual looks and testament to the unknown depths of females.

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

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

He had grown up in an age when storytelling was founded on the forthright principles of passing the time and dissolving the hours of dark.

a running narration that attempted the same leap as all storytelling, to get the listener across the gap into the skin of the other,

felt the stirring of a family trait I hadn’t realised I possessed until right then, but which would inform the kind of life I would end up living, that is, what authority provoked in me was a desire to be an outlaw. ‘Well,

‘It’s likely your love is doomed, Noe,’ he said, and then, with the blue glint of a Cyrano smile, added, ‘We must make sure you give it everything you’ve got.’

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.