This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

It long since accepted that by dint of personality and geography its destiny was to be a place passed over, and gently, wholly forgotten.

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

Making the Welcome remained a kind of constitutional imperative. My grandparents, like all the old people in Faha then, preserved intact ancient courtesies. The cost of it, the way they would be living in the days after we left, was not hinted at, nor did it once occur to me.

Nothing happened and continued to happen.

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

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.

The music was a feature of the landscape and as such not pass-remarkable.

‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like tea?’

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.

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