Anatomy of Happiness

I shouldn’t write this. I should investigate states beyond happiness: meditative bliss and enlightenment. I should emphasize the fact that happy moments are transient, that within peak experiences lie seeds of suffering. Veiled Melancholy, as Keats has it. But meditation is a slog, I’m not enlightened, and what I want to investigate (with much nostalgia) are times when I felt truly happy. My seven examples are mainly where happiness lasted more than a day. I’m avoiding examples where I was happy just through relief—a loved-one home after unexplained lateness, finances less dire than I thought, a broken machine fixed, a furious row resolved into hugs and kisses. Pleasure in those occasions is fleeting. If I try to milk more happiness from the relief—‘She’s home, thank God’—it eludes me. The source of stress removed, life resumes its humdrum course. I don’t share these memories to flaunt occasional good fortune. I do it to examine their nature and origin in a search for insight. People who gush about a wonderful time they’ve had, and post photos of it on Facebook, are irritating. I hope readers will suppress irritation: I assure them I’ve filled a long life with plenty of failures and unworthy actions, and the present is far from blissful. I’m intrigued how the occasions I describe are imbued with their surroundings, and sometimes with a particular piece of music. Were the setting or the song essential ingredients? Or simply dragged in, the way the pattern in a carpet, the flowers on a fuchsia bush, can be tied to painful memories? In those, the pattern or the flowers didn’t augment the feeling, merely framed it. Like an archaeologist uncovering the levels of Troy, I present examples in reverse chronology. Example 1. Seven years ago. I’m sitting at an old wooden table near the back door of our farmhouse in Wales. All around are the fields of the smallholding. For fifteen years we’ve struggled to establish a garden and deal with livestock. Now I’m shelling borlotti beans from our polytunnel. My wife, busy nearby, approves my labour. The sawtooth outcrops on the horizon are six miles away. The sun is warm on my back and I’m satisfied by the growing pile of beans in one glass bowl and empty pods in another. The beans are buff with reddish brown streaks and blotches, each unique like an abstract painting. There’s no external music—only a buzzard crying to its young, crows chattering, and the breeze sighing in the treetops. But there’s always music in my head. What it was in the bean example I don’t remember. The main qualities of the occasion are its simplicity, its rarity, and its sense of being—not exactly in a bubble, because the birds and horizon are very present—but some kind of sacred space, like a clearing in a dark wood or a sunlit skerry surrounded by murky depths. There’s a blend of pleasant sensations—the sun’s warmth, wifely approval, the beauty (at different scales) of the horizon and the patterns on the beans. A painting, by Vuillard say, might frame myself and the table seen from an upstairs window, leaving out slugs, weeds, rotting fence-posts, and produce never ripened or harvested too late. Being ‘in the flow’ of the task allows me to forget those failures. There’s a sense of purpose—the beans are sustenance. Simply sketching the beans I might feel trivial, unproductive, deterred by the carping inner voice that has been with me since childhood, maybe from my parents. For now the voice is silent, my joy unsullied. The feeling of happiness lasts all day. Even now, sad at leaving those rolling fields, accepting old age and diminished strength for life in town, I revisit it with as much pleasure as regret. Example 2. Forty years earlier. Contrast and relief come into this example, but because the feeling lasts for days (and is easily revisited) I present it as authentic. The contrast is in the scenery. We’ve been waiting at a border post to drive our VW beetle into Mexico. Americans around us are fuming at the bureaucratic delay, and we fear we should have brought more car documents. But suddenly we’re free to go on. From the blank dusty streets of Laredo (only later do I think of that song) we enter the flower-strewn boulevards of Nuevo Laredo, full of life. People are strolling, chatting, looking around, unlike the citizens of the town we’ve left. It’s a different world only two days’ journey from our home in Kansas. The sense of adventure and fulfillment lasts five days, until we turn north through the Sonora desert, where boredom sets in. But not even boredom diminishes the sense of achievement, and this is where the music comes. After hearing a tune at a roadside stall on the descent from the Sierra Madre, I add these banal words: ‘In the state of Sinaloa, in the town of Mazatlán.’ Banal, but so cheerful. I wrote ‘a sense of achievement’ almost without thinking. Is achievement essential for happiness? In Example 1 the achievement was minimal—shelling beans is child’s play, there were no obstacles. Which is what made the task so pleasant. So does one win either way: enjoy what’s easy, or enjoy overcoming what isn’t? I hesitated to present this example, because nowadays it doesn’t count as an achievement. I know people who are much more widely travelled, in more exotic locations. But part of my joy at reaching Mexico was assuaging my youthful gripe, ‘I haven’t travelled enough!’ And as André Gide remarks (in Si Le Grain Ne Meurt) about his first trip to Algeria, ‘Many others had been: what was new and different was our going.’ Example 3. Two years and a half before, in London. My wife has gone into labour with our first child. I have no worries about the birth. I find it hard to believe how little anxiety I suffered in those far-off days. Today, social gatherings, bank accounts, simple car journeys, set me on edge. But at least (I believe) I’m no longer blind to consequences as I was in those far-off days of moral myopia and unskillful actions. I’ve left my wife in Whittington Hospital, told to come back next day. I’m filled with euphoria. I have a clear image of walking (‘on air’—a cliché coming true) across the bridge on Hornsey Lane over Archway Road far below. Even in those pre-ultrasound days I know the child will be a son. There’s no music associated with that memory. The feeling lasts well beyond the birth. It fades when my wife and son come home and we realize our responsibilities, but I still easily revisit it. And strangely enough, the setting is significant in other ways. The other day, checking the London A to Z street guide, I had a revelation. Before I married I had a bedsit in Hampstead with a view of Highgate. The green patina on a distant copper dome was a striking landmark. That dome in Waterlow Park happens to be right behind Whittington Hospital. I feel like an explorer who realizes Mount X and Mount Y, named from different viewpoints, are the same. Whittington Hospital, by the way, is named for Dick Whittington, a young apprentice in the Middle Ages. Unhappy with his master he decided to leave London. But heading north he heard church bells sing, ‘Turn again, Whittington, Lord Mayor of London.’ He turned, and did become Lord Mayor. A few months after my son is born, driving up Archway Road heading north for a job in Leeds on my Honda 50 (some journey!) I pass under that same bridge and wonder like Dick whether I’ll return. (I don’t.) Example 4. A year before. This example has specific music and—incongruously for a love story—a specific location outside a dentist’s. I set off along England’s Lane in the north London suburb of Hampstead after my appointment. My filling doesn’t hurt. The weather is warm and sunny. The music in my head is ‘You Know What I Mean’ by the Vernons Girls, which when I think of it now brings euphoria flooding back. Suddenly, unexpectedly, after many disappointments and false trails, life is smiling on me again: I’m in love, and loved in return (and we dance the twist together). There is an element of contrast, with my previous lonely existence, but more important is the word ‘unexpectedly’. The weather plays its part, and so does the cheerful weirdness of the song. It’s probably a cliché that love makes one more sensitive to music. Other songs associated with our courtship take me back strongly when I think of them. That sensitivity faded, buried under habit and practical worries. But like those rivers in limestone country that dive underground only to re-emerge, the feeling of that day is with me as strong as ever. Example 5. Six months before. I’ve just moved to London from my home town in the North of England, and between visits from friends looking for parties to gatecrash, I’m lonely. At first I shared a flat but that didn’t work out, so now I live alone. I go on a few dates, but those don’t work out either. I absorb myself in my job on a technical magazine, often staying to work into mid-evening. New Year’s Eve is especially grim. I want to head for the crowds around the fountains in Trafalgar Square, but the Tube isn’t running. In January I decide to join an amateur drama group. I’m invited to audition for The Winter’s Tale. The leading actor has dropped out and to my amazement I’m given the part. The setting for the most intense moment is a dingle on Hampstead Heath. I’m sitting on a stone. The weather isn’t too cold. It’s the weekend and my good fortune has just sunk in. The play text is in my hand, with penciled cuts and annotations by the director. I’m reading Act IV where dire events in Sicily give way to the lightheartedness of Bohemia. Once again, a song brings back the glorious feeling: I’m no longer alone, I have exhilarating company in a delightful play. The song is ‘Get Thee Hence For I Must Go’, sung by the thieving pedlar Autolycus to the credulous shepherdesses. At first I think ‘ill’ in ‘If to either thou dost ill’ is a verb. When I realize it’s a noun I laugh. That laugh is like a motif for the feeling, which persists for weeks until anxiety takes over. The director drops out, and in a rash Olivier-type move I offer to direct as well as play Leontes. But all goes well. And in the audience, unknown to me, is the girl who will become my wife. Example 6. I’m ten years old, at the dinner table in my parents’ house. The white tablecloth has been removed after Sunday lunch, leaving a brown felt underlay, a familiar base for homework and inter-meal activities. My father, a member of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers (motto: Decus et Tutamen) probably supplied the felt. I’m building a house with my Bayco set, a clunky system of rods and brick-patterned tiles, some red, some white. Red one-piece roofs, green doors and window frames, bay windows, white pillars, arches, even a pointed roof for a gazebo. How to arrange all these is my absorbing and satisfying task as designer. Often, my pleasure in the moment is muted by the thought that someone else is having a better time. That isn’t happening. I’m sorry for anyone who isn’t me. A hymn heard earlier that afternoon at Sunday School runs through my head: ‘A Man There Lived in Galilee’. The jolly tune ‘Tyrol’ has a catchy rhythm and pleasing intervals. (Perhaps a musicologist could explain why some intervals create happiness—for example the one between the sixth and seventh notes of Pachelbel’s chaconne, and several in ‘Clarão de Lua’ by Nazaré Pereira.) Normally I go grudgingly to Sunday School, annoyed at having to change into my best clothes, but that day’s session has been unusually pleasant—more to do with seeing friends than feeling religious. The elements of this occasion are satisfaction in solving a design problem, the absence of any sense it isn’t worthwhile (my parents, sleepy after Sunday roast, are leaving me to it), and definitely the music of the hymn, which when I remember it brings back the feeling strongly. The joy lasts several hours, until the table is set for the evening meal. Example 7. A song from when I was six arouses a strong memory of contentment. ‘Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think’ by Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians must have accompanied some activity I was absorbed in. Writing, drawing, cutting out pictures of military aircraft? I was lonely in that house, before we moved to the one in Example 6, but was happy on my own when some project took all my attention. At that age I didn’t question whether what I was doing was Worthwhile or Career Advancing. Still trailing clouds of confidence, perhaps? Another song from that era evokes the cul-de-sac we lived in. I had no friends my own age but I knew most of the neighbours, especially the lovely lady next door I called Auntie Lesley. One, a young man of eighteen, showed me his train set (and no, there was no funny business) and a strange figurine called ‘Billiken: God of Things As They Ought To Be’. A woman whose pilot son was killed in the war showed me his scale models of fighter planes. A girl five years older than me sometimes tolerated my company. A girl much younger confused me by saying ‘Daddy Kimmus’ was going to bring presents. What brings them all back so clearly is ‘Dear Hearts and Gentle People’ sung by Bing Crosby. Ah, that picket fence and rambling rose! I planned to add more examples, but rejected them because of clinging. How often I’ve anxiously looked forward to something, impatient with anything that might get in the way, only to find when it arrives that the life has been drained from it. I’m reminded of lines in Strindberg’s Dream Play (translation by Elizabeth Sprigge): INDRA’S DAUGHTER. What was wrong with the fishnet? BILLSTICKER. Wrong? Well, there wasn’t anything wrong exactly. But it wasn’t what I’d had in mind, and so I didn’t enjoy it quite as much . . . It’s as if I strain to print the scene and emotion onto my brain, to add to my stock of experiences. ‘Life might be humdrum, but at least that happened!’ And to assuage the fear that such pleasure might never be repeated. Blake said it all, of course. The threads that run through these rare examples are effortlessness, lack of egotism, lack of striving, playfulness, and letting things take their course even when being creative. Immersing myself in the process, allowing simple mechanisms—the seams of the bean pods, the holes in the Bayco bases, the friction of pen on paper—to dictate it. Usually, engaged in some activity, I have such a clear idea of what I want to achieve that any obstacle makes me stressed and anxious. Also, I’m often greedy to get on with several tasks or projects at once, and can’t decide which to prioritize. It’s especially hard when I’m keen to do an indoor task, but the sun is shining, calling me, calling me. Ah well. I’m learning to see greed as unskillful, just like clinging. The most intense times of happiness have been unexpected—sometimes inexplicable. That seems to be what gives them their quality. Moments of contentment in my present life are still tainted by the fear that they won’t last (of course they won’t!) and recently, bedeviled by investigation: ‘If I’m looking beyond happiness I shouldn’t enjoy this moment.’ But I’m reassured by the Zen saying: ‘If it’s a good day, we shouldn’t be uneasy about being happy. We shouldn’t be attached to non-attachment.’ Will this analysis weakens the sensation roused by a place or piece of music? I don’t think so. Whatever happens I’m grateful, and mean to avoid that Nessun maggior dolore angst. More than anything, I wish all beings could share those feelings, or at the very least be free from pain and suffering.