Happiness

I HESITATE to speak on a subject so often discussed and by such competent investigators, the more so because my modest contribution may be called anything but modest by some readers. And not only that: I may be set down either as a liar or as a victim of a diseased imagination. I hope I am not the first, and if I am the second, then let me be victimized to the end of my days, and much oftener than has been the case in the past.

What leads me to break silence is a recent conversation in which I played the part of a listener. Several people contributed, and all agreed that there is not, and probably never has been even for short periods, such a state of being as would be described by the words ‘pure happiness.’ Love was considered the nearest approach, but was ruled out as being marred by the thought of unworthiness, or unattainability, or transientness; there was certain to be some defect, however slight, so that happiness in love could never be said to reach perfection. That may be. But there is a happiness, I know, not concerned with love, which may, with truth, be called flawless.

It is a solitary, individual kind of happiness; perhaps I had best call it felicity, to convey some conception of its nature. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’ is concerned with it, of course, but whether the intimations are of that seems to me questionable. My own intimations might better be called brief realizations of felicity on a plane of being terrestrial and extraterrestrial at the same moment. But they are so definitely concerned with this good earth that, could I enjoy them oftener, I could wish for no heaven save this we have.

It is usually in periods of idleness that the blessedness comes. The surroundings are not important, although I have never experienced it in any city. I have known it while sitting with friends engaged in commonplace conversation, but I enjoy it oftenest — if one may use the word ‘often’ in connection with so rare an occurrence — when alone, out of doors, and far from human habitations.

One of my early ‘visitations’ — for I am at a loss what else to call them — came when I was a boy of eight, or thereabout. It was in the never-to-be-sufficiently-lamented days of dirt roads, and I was standing on a hill beside such a road, watching a farmer’s wagon, loaded with wheat, and with one wheel chained as a brake, descending the hill. There had been a shower of rain, and the chained wheel left a shining bluish track in the damp clay. As I was gazing at the track the happiness flooded over me, transforming and transfiguring everything. I was too young to know what to make of it — I am still too young, or too old — and if I said anything to myself it was, probably, ‘Gee whiz! I wish I could feel like this all the time!’ In my treasury of boyhood recollections, there is none I prize more highly than this one. The glory of it has not yet faded.

Other such experiences followed. I will mention one which came when I was a young man of twenty. I don’t remember the place, except that it was not far from a little Iowa town set in the midst of some of the most beautiful pastoral country in the whole of the U. S. A. I was sitting in a field, under some trees, talking with a friend. But I am not wholly certain of the talk; we may have been merely sitting. In any case, I was ‘beatified’ once more, and there is no possible way of describing such an experience. Only those who have had others like it will understand what it is. I said nothing to my friend, but I was astonished years later, upon meeting him again, to hear him say, in the midst of a talk about many things, ‘By the way, do you remember a day, long ago . . .’ And he went on to speak of the very place and moment. I said, ‘Yes, I do remember, distinctly,’ and there we left it. Neither of us tried to account to the other for the quality of that shared experience. For all I know it may have been a shared ‘ visitation.’ If so, it is the only one in my treasury.

And now for a recent one, for I still trail wisps from the boyhood clouds of glory. I was cycling along a stretch of road that I know well, having traveled it numberless times during the past fifteen years. At least, I thought I knew it well, having never before seen it in the light that rarely comes. But now it came, and I found myself on one of the veritable highroads of heaven. Everything was changed: the trees, the sky, the mountains, the lagoon, the sea beyond, and two natives working out their road tax by cutting the grass and weeds along the borders of the road. ‘Road tax,’ ‘weeds,’ do I say? How far the words come from reporting either the celestial occupation or the carpet of green that called for it! And the swish of their sickles was the very music of the spheres. Alas! By the time I turned in at my place, I was merely J. N. H. once more, pushing an old bike whose chain wanted oiling.

Moments, yes, and few and far between, but I am sure that many of us have them. And when we hear someone say that there never is nor can be such a thing as pure happiness, we reply: ‘Speak for yourself, sir, but not for us.’

JAMES NORMAN HALL