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

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?

For balance I leaned back into the brown smells of his chest and there 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.

You don’t see rain stop, but you sense it. You sense something has changed in the frequency you’ve been living and you hear the quietness you thought was silence get quieter still, and you raise your head so your eyes can make sense of what your ears have already told you, which at first is only: something has changed.

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.

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.

Just that there was light and a lightening, a lifting, and when I stepped outside the air had the slender, quickened and hopeful spirit that is in the word April.

‘Human beings are creations more profound than human beings can fathom.’ Christy mounted his bicycle. ‘That’s one of the proofs of God,’ he said, ‘there’s no other explanation.’

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.

On remote houses in the rain a spirit-conquering loneliness fell, and entered, and, though front doors were kept open, it would not easily leave.

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.

they wore the good shoes that, though laced and shining, from small use and foot disorder were pure murder. So, the general sigh when all sat down. And my feeling that I was in the company of the heroic or the needing to be healed.

This is the big one, the church seemed to say, and an entirely different congregation assembled, one notable for brightness of colour and a quiet if unexpressed joy that once again Christ had risen.

We spend most of our lives guarding against washes of feeling, I’m guarding no more.

Giving it everything grew him by two inches. They were two inches he was unaware he had, but we all have them, folded up on themselves inside the purse of the heart.

As with everything since the seven days of creation, work was behind schedule.

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

tendons twang-snapping, releasing an arrow of realisation that God made man out of elastics and sticks,

a tumult let the details tumble down the stairs of his brain and out his mouth.

To conquer both time and reality then, one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion.

‘Some of the things you do when you’re young are unforgivable to you when you’re old,’

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.

In many versions, all of life is a fall from grace. In this one, I’m hoping to go the other way. I’m working on life as a rise to grace, after a fall. After several falls, in fact.

where soon after he’d start developing the soft, round bottom of a man who sat on money for a living.

‘Life is a comedy, with sad bits.’

I can’t say I knew what would happen next. By a crossed wire in our brains it’s only after a thing happens that you realise you knew it was going to. In this life, I-could-see-that-coming and I-couldn’t-see-that-coming both amount to the same thing, because in neither case did you make a difference.

and he had to resort to a politician’s ploy of inventing the truth on the spot.

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.

Wives have to be wiser than their husbands.

a spirit of community. It sat there, in some part not assuaging but making liveable the harrowing knowledge of I will not see that person in this life again.

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.