This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

It came like a judgement, or, in benign version, like a blessing God had forgotten he had left on.

That they were going to attend church was not in doubt, but because of the thorny relation of religion to the masculine they would show no eagerness and shielded off any sense of the spiritual with a studied casualness and a mastery of the essential art of saying nothing.

Someone has said religion lasted longer in Ireland because we were an imaginative people, and so could most vividly picture the fires of Hell. And

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

Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation.

What is true is that to survive she had pared away any surface softness, was as practical as her husband impractical, appeared to have small tolerance for the whimsy, dreaming, and grand designs of men in general, and Ganga in particular.

Could be a description of my Grandma on my Dad’s side

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.

Generosity to visitors was a helpless affliction in west Clare,

abstinence proved unequal to desire, and

Rain in Clare chose intercourse with wind, all kinds, without discrimination, and came any way it could, wantonly.

You live a decent length you get an appreciation for the individuality of creation.

While the women went into the shops the men waited, lighting up. To a man they were all skilled in the essential but unsung art of passing the time of day.

Many had a pony and trap they brought out on Sundays. But Ganga and Doady had little vanity and thought Christ would appreciate the savings and overlook the plainness of the transport.

For an island people, at that time we were appalling swimmers. Whether from an overdeveloped respect for the power of nature, a shame of undress, or breathtaking stupidity, no one learned how to swim then.

So compelling is the evidence of our own eyes and ears, so swift is your mind to assemble your own version of the story, that one of the hardest things in this world is to understand there’s another way of seeing things.

In that place that was doggedly, darkly masculine he made the air tender.

There is a universal recipe to the reaction on waking after such a night. It is one-part shame, two-parts rebuke, three-parts disbelief, and the rest is just pure astonishment. The inside of my mouth was sandpaper, my eyes on stalks. I felt as far from myself as I ever had, but not without an element of thrill.

The truth turns into a story when it grows old. We all become stories in the end.

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.

Neighbours, as Jesus knew, can be a not insignificant challenge to anyone’s Christianity.

By native decree, and the proven truth that no nation spoke faster, punctuation in prayer had been long ago dispensed with, breathless delivery was acceptable to the Lord who could pause, parse and separate the string of prayers in His own time.

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.

Christy got into his bed, crossed his hands on his chest. ‘For both of us, wonders are coming.’

I couldn’t let that go. I leaned up on an elbow. ‘How can you say that? It’s nonsense. How do you know?’ ‘Only God knows. But He is old and needs reminding.’ He raised his voice and to the thatch said: ‘Wonders coming for Noe and Christy.’

It was a given then that with musicians in Clare it was difficult to start them, to stop them impossible.

the aches the Good Lord sets into old men’s bones to make appealing Eternal Rest,

Once standing, any decent story has a life of its own and can run whichever way it wants.

A story grows in the gaps where the facts fall short.

The sad truth is that, like fish, the looks of the Irish are not improved by sunshine, and if you ever see

one of the unwritten tenets of the local poetics was that a story must never arrive at the point, or risk conclusion.

in a genius move of utter simplicity God had set the high bar for Christianity by saying Love your neighbour like yourself,

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.

Not overly burdened by intelligence

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.

‘Life is a comedy, with sad bits.’

Wives have to be wiser than their husbands.

The sunlight was veiled but radiant still, and in that country graveyard it seemed was one of the fundaments of existence, 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.

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.