Happiness

 I will admit my writing may be gloomy to the point of grim. Nihilism I do try to avoid. I have depression, but I take my Zoloft. T2 told me I needed a mood elevator. I disagree - derangement I have had more than enough of, and I feel quite stable. 

All these things accurately describe my current state of mind. However, I would not say that I am happy - not in the sense of giddy joyful nonchalance to reality's sharp point of discontent. I am not sure if there is happiness like that.

Then I read There’s Nothing Literary About Being Sad by Mairead Small Staid from The Millions.

“Happiness is unattainable, it’s extraordinarily mysterious, brilliantly mysterious,” says Marguerite Duras. “Let us never utter this word again.” But I could not obey; I could not stop uttering the word, once discovered: happiness. And once uttered, I realized I was not alone in my fascination with this word and the slight yet insistent feeling it pointed towards; it had been there all along, overlooked, tucked onto the shelves as surely as those countless accounts of illness and injury and abuse. Happiness springs from the page as Clarissa Dalloway considers “what she loved: life; London; this moment of June” and spirals through the poems of Jack Gilbert, who writes, “We must risk delight.” In “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Ursula K. Le Guin gently scolds my younger, pain-besotted self: “The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid… But to praise despair is to condemn delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else.”

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Happiness writes in white ink on a white page. When I first read it, I understood the quote as another dismissal: happiness was a blank space, a lack. Happiness had nothing to say. But I have since taken these words—whatever their author’s intention—to mean otherwise. White ink on a white page is not the same as an empty page. To read it, we must simply look closer, lift the flame higher, glance aslant. We must make tracings or rubbings, pressing our fingers to the paper’s warp and weft. We must rise to the strange challenge of happiness.

I feel rather rebuked right now. It has me thinking: not all can be miserable, just as all cannot be joyful, for if one or the other were all then it would cease to be miserable or joyful. Without light there is no dark and without the dark there is no light. So think about it.  I am.

sch