A Private History of Happiness (10 page)

He was currently staying at his summer home in Beverly Farms, a pleasant and fashionable coastal resort not far from Boston. It was here that he generally celebrated his birthdays, often receiving an array of telegrams and letters. As he had grown older, he had declared to would-be visitors that he was “not at home” on the day, which he wanted to spend in rural peace.

He was feeling well. His life had been extremely successful. He had accomplished much, and had received various honors.

But now he was not thinking about his great achievements. Instead, being at peace with himself, he called to mind a moment from his birthday: “I wish you could all have been with me on the 29th; every flower of garden and greenhouse, and fruits that Paradise would not have been ashamed of, embowered and emblazoned our wayside dwelling.” It must have been a beautiful late summer day, as the season along the shore was coming to an end.

He had achieved great status in academia and culture. But his summer house, where he could be at peace, made him happy without any further acclaim or fuss. He was glad that the flowers and trees graced his world there.

As he was writing this letter, he recalled with great joy the momentary surge of all that green and color, greeting his elderly senses as fresh and full as ever. He had the added pleasure of reflection: “Grow old, my dear Boys, grow old!” In a way, it was the word “grow” that connected this ironic advice (what choice was there?) to the blazing display of the birthday blooms. People and plants shared this creative principle.

In the prime of his life, he had been successful on many fronts, sometimes against strong opposition, as when he defended the germ theory of infection. Now he felt that as an old man, he might be accepted simply for being still in this world; and so he could enjoy the pleasures of each passing moment, almost as if it were his last, but without fear or regret.

Yamanoue no Okura, poet and official, composing a poem

KYOTO, JAPAN
• CA. 700 CE

When I eat melon

My children come to mind;

When I eat crisp chestnuts

All the stronger is my love for them.

Oh, whence do they come

Time after time present in my thoughts?

How can I just fall asleep soundly?

Yamanoue no Okura was a scholar and official living at the Japanese imperial court in Kyoto. He was middle-aged and a distinguished scholar at a time when scholarship brought political status. In his later career, he became an envoy to China and a provincial governor. But when he wrote about his feelings, his career was not the most important part of his life. When he tried to express what made him feel good to be alive on this earth, he ignored the grandeur of court life, the honors and the ceremonies. He said nothing about wealth or power. Instead, he talked about the joy that his children had given him. Compared with that, the rest was insignificant.

Here he captured two moments that were extremely simple. First there was the joy of eating melon. When he tasted this fruit, his children were present to him with the same sweetness. Then there were “crisp chestnuts,” a favorite treat of Japanese autumns. The sweetness of the chestnuts brought the love for his children harmoniously to mind. They were the sweetest part of his life, and his poem enabled him to convey how he felt when he was mindful of them: it was like the taste of the best fruit in the world.

The fact of his children’s existence was more intense because they themselves were not with him right now. The wonder of having these children blended with the astonishment that the world had such sweet flavors to offer. Not only did melon and chestnut exist, but they were
part of everyday life. It took no struggle or chance to come upon them. They were not the spoils of war or the rewards of toil. They were free blessings. The flavor of life flowed like love.

What makes the children “time after time present in my thoughts,” Yamanoue no Okura wondered. What was the deep and hidden source of such blessing, the secret spring from which the river of life arose and flowed into people’s lives? The curiosity was part of the happiness of these moments. He was a very reflective man, and questions were like melon and chestnuts to him—they opened in his mind with a sweet taste.

His curiosity, his feelings, had led him to explore philosophy more widely than was common at the imperial court. Reaching beyond the Buddhist values that were orthodox there, he discovered the power of the Chinese thinker Confucius, with his distinctive emphasis on family love.

Sometimes the stream of his children’s images was so vivid that it would not let him go to sleep at night. This was the passionate sense of life itself, too full of energy for the mind to sink into slumber. In those nighttime hours, his joy was surely mixed with longing.

When he had that tang of melon and chestnut in his mouth, his children seemed present, immediately. It was this sense of closeness, the reality of his love for these children, that gave Yamanoue no Okura true moments of happiness.

Charlotte Bousfield, engineer’s wife, writing in her diary

BEDFORD, BEDFORDSHIRE
• AUGUST 3, 1879

In the afternoon all of us except Ted went to Ampthill Park and had tea in it. John rode the bicycle in turn with Will, and Papa and myself with the girls and Florence rode and walked by turns; the afternoon was delightful and we thoroughly enjoyed our meal in the open air.

The first Monday of August was a public holiday in Victorian Britain, and it was a fine, sunny one in 1879 in the town of Bedford, north of London. Charlotte Bousfield, a middle-aged woman, was taking her family for an outing. Her husband, Edward (“Papa”), was a successful engineer with one of the leading manufacturers of farming machinery.

The eldest son, Will, had graduated from Cambridge University in mathematics. He was now becoming a patent lawyer in Bristol, having acquired his father’s interest in new inventions. He was in his mid-twenties. With him on that day was his wife, Florence. They had married that April, and this was their first proper visit to his parents as a wedded couple. The second-eldest brother, Ted, a recently qualified doctor, was missing because he had to be at work. The youngest, John, was in his early twenties and lived with family friends in the Essex town of Chelmsford, so he, too, was home on a visit. There were two daughters: Lottie, who at seventeen had just left school and was being trained by her mother in the domestic skills required to run a Victorian household, and Hattie, thirteen and still at school.

The Bousfields went to a country estate near Bedford, Ampthill Park, where the grounds were open for people to enjoy themselves. They took turns riding a bicycle. The two young men, being faster, were haring off first, the others taking their turns.

Victorian families have the reputation of having been rigid. On that August holiday, the Bousfields were at ease: husband and wife, older and younger, they all shared the same enjoyment.

The love of cycling went with a liking for new machines and gadgets, a professional field for Papa and Will and a shared enthusiasm for Charlotte, the mother. Yet in another way, the openness of the air and the parkland setting were an antidote to the industrious pattern of their normal days. Ampthill had been a royal residence long ago, and the park had been laid out by the eighteenth-century master designer Capability Brown. His liking for romantic vistas meant that it was perfect for cycling and strolling, without needing to arrive anywhere. That was no doubt one reason for the relaxed way they were able to take turns. These were busy folk who did not normally have time to dawdle and linger. Their days were usually driven by purpose.

This afternoon blossomed into happiness when they had a picnic together. There is a lovely sense of a shared experience in “our meal,” the picnic that they liked to take with them on such outings. Back then, there was almost something daring about having a meal “in the open air.” They were shaking off the constraints of convention that governed everyday life rather tightly.

Yet this was also an expression of their essential personalities. Charlotte Bousfield’s chosen words, “thoroughly enjoyed,” capture how this happiness grew out of their way of living. Everything they did, this family did thoroughly. So they experienced this glimpse of leisure as fully as they committed themselves to the rhythms of work.

For Will and Florence, this was an afternoon of being warmly received as a married couple. Her new mother-in-law had been friendly and supportive to Florence during the engagement, and it must have been pleasant for the newlyweds to spend such a relaxed holiday afternoon. While Victorian family life was often very formal, here the casual setting and the shared recreation made for a genuine ease and enjoyment together.

Tryphena White, daughter of a settler family, writing in her diary

CAMILLUS, NEW YORK
• AUGUST 5, 1805

Monday, we washed in rain water which we caught a few days before, and baked, and in the afternoon we began to move our little all over the river to our new building; we got our things chiefly over, at least those things which we wanted most to keep house with, and I went up [the steps to the] chamber and made up the beds on the floor. Polly came over to help me [. . .] The building is something like our shop, there is two rooms in it, and the chimney is right in the middle of the house, or is to be, for it is not built yet, the lower floor is all in one room, and a joiner’s table in one end of it, and a joiner at work. We have some shelves made to put our crockery etc. on, and a trap door to go down [into the] cellar with, and just one half of our chamber floor laid, and that with loose rough boards, we have 4 beds down, 2 one side of the room and 2 the other. My bed I have partitioned off with a curtain. We have a place made out a little way from the house to hang on a pot and kettle, and we do our cooking there. It is very customary for people here to keep their fire outdoors, when they have a fire place, but we feel as proud of our house, as inconvenient as it is, as ever any person did of the most elegant house in the world.

The White family moved from their longtime home in West Springfield, Massachusetts, to a new settlement in upstate New York. Camillus was hardly a village yet, just a few houses and the beginnings of a square. Tryphena White’s father, Joseph, was building a small house in Genesee Street, where a few others already stood; he also had a water mill built nearby.

Tryphena White was in her early twenties. Her brother Elijah was still at home, and her older sister, Anna, together with her husband, had also moved to Camillus. The children’s mother had died many years before, and they now had an affectionate stepmother called Phebe (Phoebe).

In June 1805, Tryphena White had recorded the beginning of the construction of their new home: “Saturday in the afternoon our building was raised.” For the meantime, they had to camp, and conditions were difficult. On this Monday morning in August, they “washed in rain water,” which they had stored from the rainfall a few days ago, and also did some baking. The afternoon was very special: “We began to move our little all.” She had been looking forward to this day for a long time, coping with the primitive conditions and the lack of privacy. They went “over the river,” where the water mill would be built, and arrived at their new home.