This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

Your father is a mystery it takes your whole life to unravel.

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.

I left the world, not only because my feet were no longer on the ground but because when you’re a boy your grandfather’s chest has a peculiar and profound allure, like a spawn pool for salmon, wherein mysteries are resolved.

we sailed not back along the estuary road towards Faha, but west to the coast, because, with heart-wisdom, Ganga understood that the ageless remedy for a boy whose mother was ill was to bring him to see the ocean.

But even then, in those first moments beside him on the windowsill, I think I knew there was something arresting about him. Everybody carries a world. But certain people change the air about them. That’s the best I can say.

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.

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

A wife knows with some exactitude the limits of her husband, and so in her heart Doady already knew that Ganga would not sign up for the work, but it’s human nature to dream, and in the vexed nature of marriage to hope time will harmonise the irreconcilable.

By the grace of new chapters, it was morning.

Sometime maybe you’ve had the sense that something has arrived in your life, and what it is you can’t tell, but it’s as though a gate you haven’t checked in a while must have blown open, and without even going to look you know it has. You’ve no proof, nothing you can point to, but you know: something has blown open.

So, though the narrative was flawed, the sense was of a life so lived it was epic.

I’ll say this too. It seems to me, there was little culture of complaint then.

The moths of Easter, I said aloud, and they flew in memory and dissolved again the way the smallest things of your life do.

He lifted the teacup and performed an impeccable demonstration of how you deny reality.

Good Friday was then a day of almost universal quiet. Consider it. Some beautiful things have perished.

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.

As decreed by a Church authority supremely oblivious to the reality of climates beyond Rome, for Easter lilies were paramount.

In the time before Mass the congregation participated in one of the characteristic joys of all mankind, looking at itself.

Now this was back in old God’s time.

Loved the book titled by this phrase!

When the music ended the players lowered their instruments and took up their glasses, resuming their habitual shyness but allowing a glint in their eyes now if they met another’s, a silent acknowledgement, not so much, it seemed to me, that they had played the music, but that they had been there when it happened.

Sometimes a moment pierces so perfectly the shields of our everyday it becomes part of you and enjoys the privilege of being immemorial. I remember it as though it were today. Honestly.

and because I am not, and know I cannot be, the pain is sharp and true and all-consuming, because it is the pain of yourself.

Do I exaggerate? Of course I do. The truth doesn’t care. Here’s the thing life teaches you: sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration.

His hand smelled grown up. It smelled of whiskey and white cotton and woodsmoke and sandalwood musk, and instantly I thought This is what men should smell like, but how you came by it, by what gravity, engagement and life experience it entered your skin, seemed in the same instant beyond the likes of me.

He was facing down to the river. ‘Some of the things you do when you’re young are unforgivable to you when you’re old,’ he said at last.

‘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.