A Private History of Happiness (2 page)

A Divine Little Book
• George Ridpath

At Ease Watching the Boats
• Walt Whitman

A Poet’s Son Goes to Bed
• Ann Yearsley

Notes

Index

About this Book

Reviews

Also by this Author

About the Author

An Invitation from the Publisher

Copyright

We can immediately tell when someone is happy. It shows in their eyes and becomes, at that instant, their presence in the world.

In the pages that follow, there are ninety-nine moments of happiness. Each was experienced by an individual at a specific time—a few minutes, an hour, one particular day—ranging from over four thousand years ago to the recent past. These were women and men, young and old, of various backgrounds. They lived (or traveled) in many parts of the world, including North America and Britain; Continental Europe and China; North Africa, India, and Japan. They were on city streets or by rural rivers, in gardens or on mountaintops, in cottages or mansions, on long journeys or short breaks when they had these varied moments of color and sensation, understanding and peace, contact and laughter.

These everyday experiences of happiness have remained vivid and recognizable across the centuries, even millennia. They come naturally into focus, making lives that might otherwise seem distant feel intuitively understandable. Many of these joyful moments belong to diaries, which in different forms have been kept by people since the dawn of writing. Others are from letters, another form of personal chronicles of passing time. A few were written as poems, usually rather private works. Even in the case of well-known individuals, these are generally words from their quieter side.

These focused glimpses of other lives and times add up to a bigger idea. They bring real human happiness before our eyes. We can see here the potential for joy hidden inside ordinary life. This is a surprising and renewing effect in our own complex and high-pressure time. For many of us in the twenty-first century, happiness has become a riddle, a goal that remains strangely nebulous. Politics and economics, education and psychology all have happiness as their promise or end. But we need to grasp the happiness that is a strand of everyday life if we are to make good on any of these promises. If we look at the statistics, we are, in industrialized societies, in general wealthier and healthier than our ancestors—but are we happier?

Like seeing colors or hearing a tune, feeling happy is different for each of us and in every experience. It is a sensation in the air, a depth to the horizon. These moments of joy from the past resonate
and echo, prompting positive reflection. They invite us to think about particular people’s experiences of being happy and not merely about generalities or clichés or abstract puzzles that seem to need solving. Perhaps happiness is much of a riddle because we usually look for too big an answer. Here, however, we can see how ninety-nine individuals felt happy on their unique days. All of them are witnesses to some of the richest potential in our human lives. They do not embody the world, but they do help us to imagine humanity as a whole. Across our differences, people share a common capability of happiness, and it reminds us of the universal side of our being. Equally, these were all experiences of a particular place and time, since our being is always locally shaped and flavored.
This
is what made someone happy, these pages reveal, on
one
particular day in their life.

Like us, these men and women from the past may have been simply absorbed at the instant they felt good. But soon after, they must have recognized something special about those moments of happiness—and their written records can now pass like sunbeams or a breeze through our own everyday life.

People have, on ordinary days, been glad of life without triumphing over others or accumulating fortunes. Each of these preserved records brings this truth to the fore in a fresh way and with its own shades of meaning.

If human beings seem to become possessed by destructive urges at times, they also have an instinct for the joy of small things. In surprising times and places, the world has appeared like a precious gift.

Public history tends to turn the flow of time into a staccato rhythm of “big” dates: the coronations and resignations, coups and treaties, battles and conquests that supposedly changed the world. By contrast, private history introduces us to “little” days that were important because of what one unique person felt.

As these people from many ways of life wrote down their experiences, there was an inner core that said, “This was a moment when I was happy to be alive.” Reading their words now, even centuries later, we can feel immediately how their happiness filled passing moments, creating occasions that needed to be recorded.

Each text, each voice is different, full of a particular life with all its lights and shadows. We are invited by these ninety-nine individuals to share what was specific to their experiences—a place, a time, a relationship.
Their ninety-nine moments of joy are arranged by common themes, connected to each other by the natural movement of time from morning to evening.

We gain both wisdom and pleasure from meeting these women and men. We learn naturally about happiness from their stories, which make us happy as well.

These experiences connect with our own lives. Feeling the passion of other people, their zest or deep peace, sudden pleasure or relish for life, their companionship or inwardness, we have new perspectives on the best moments in our own lives.

It is extraordinary how powerful real, remembered happiness is, how deep and true its source. Our happiest lived experiences have the power to help us face the real world with all its difficulties. They exercise a power that the advertised, virtual images and phrases of perfection do not possess. Celebrity and consumption melt away at the merest hint of trouble, but real happiness carries us onward toward the next dawn.

The aim of these pages is to show the enduring value and beauty of ordinary human happiness as we find it in passing moments.

Isabella Bird, traveler, writing a letter to her sister

TRUCKEE, CALIFORNIA
• AUGUST 31, 1873

This morning Truckee wore a totally different aspect. The crowds of the night before had disappeared. There were heaps of ashes where the fires had been. A sleepy German waiter seemed the only person about the premises, the open drinking saloons were nearly empty, and only a few sleepy-looking loafers hung about in what is called the street. It might have been Sunday; but they say that it [this day] brings a great accession of throng and jollity. Public worship has died out at present; work is discontinued on Sunday, but the day is given up to pleasure. Putting a minimum of indispensables into a bag, and slipping on my Hawaiian riding dress over a silk skirt, and a dust cloak over all, I stealthily crossed the plaza to the livery stable, the largest building in Truckee, where twelve fine horses were stabled in stalls on each side of a broad drive. My friend of the evening before showed me his “rig,” three velvet-covered side-saddles almost without horns. Some ladies, he said, used the horn of the Mexican saddle, but none “in the part” rode cavalier fashion [astride]. I felt abashed. I could not ride any distance in the conventional [sidesaddle] mode, and was just going to give up this splendid “ravage,” when the man said, “Ride your own fashion; here, at Truckee, if anywhere in the world, people can do as they like.” Blissful Truckee! In no time a large grey horse was “rigged out” in a handsome silver-bossed Mexican saddle, with ornamental leather tassels hanging from the stirrup guards, and a housing of black bear’s skin. I strapped my silk skirt on the saddle, deposited my cloak in the corn bin, and was safely on the horse’s back before his owner had time to devise any way of mounting me. Neither he nor any of the loafers who had assembled showed the slightest sign of astonishment, but all were as respectful as possible.

Isabella Bird was the daughter of an English vicar. As a child in the 1830s, she had always been ill. Her life seemed to change when she went to America the first time, in 1854, and after that she became an adventurous traveler, whose letters home also made popular books.
This morning belongs to a trip to the mountainous West made in 1873, Truckee being near Lake Tahoe and the border between California and Nevada. This was the beginning of her adventure in what had been Gold Rush country, recorded in vividly spontaneous letters to her sister in Scotland.

The railway had only reached this place a few years ago. Surrounded by forests, Truckee was still pioneer country. Here the prospectors had stopped on their way to make their fortunes in California. Bird had arrived the night before to find the town full of bonfires. Around them, the men were drinking, singing, and fighting. She went to her hotel, making her way among the revelers.

Morning seemed to have calmed the place down, leaving only “heaps of ashes.” Most of last night’s partygoers were still asleep. A few were hanging around listlessly. Businesslike and adventurous, Isabella Bird briskly began her Sunday. With an impartial eye, she noticed that nobody much seemed to be going to church. But apparently she made no judgment. She had come here to get away from the life of a vicar’s daughter.

In this sleepy little town, at least on Sunday morning, one place was already awake: the livery stable. Already, the man who ran the stable was up and about. In fact, she had had a word with him as soon as she got to Truckee. Her “friend of the evening before” was expecting her. She cast an expert eye over the horses, appreciating the saddles that he displayed for her inspection.

But then the big question arose. How did ladies ride in this part of the world? This was far more than a practical matter. The man explained, politely, how the women around here generally rode sidesaddle rather than “cavalier fashion.” It was a moment of dismay for Isabella Bird. She had set her heart on a “ravage,” a lovely word for her own private happiness, her outlaw’s freedom.

Now she felt uncomfortable, even ashamed, about being different. Perhaps people would laugh at her. The stabler sensed her discomfort and, immediately wanting to put her at ease, told her to ignore what other ladies did and ride the way she chose.

“Blissful Truckee!” Happiness is often found on the other side of the barrier called worry or shame.

John James Audubon, ornithologist and artist, writing in his travel journal

HARDWICK, DERBYSHIRE
• OCTOBER 11, 1826

By five o’clock this morning I was running by the Derwent; everything was covered with sparkling congealed dew. The fog arising from the little stream only permitted us to see its waters when they made a ripple against some rock. The vale was all mist, and had I not known where I was, and heard the notes of the Jackdaws above my head, I might have conceived myself walking through a subterraneous passage. But the sun soon began to dispel the mist, and gradually the tops of the trees, the turrets of the castle, and the church pierced through, and stood as if suspended above all objects below. All was calm till a bell struck my ear, when I soon saw the long files of women and little girls moving towards Arkwright’s Mills. Almost immediately we started for Bakewell, and breakfasted at the Rutland Arms.

John James Audubon was born in Haiti in 1785 and brought up partly in France. He became a great explorer of the American wilderness, where he had developed his own way of drawing and painting the wildlife, and particularly the birds, of remote and even dangerous places. This is a passage from the journal he kept when he came to crowded Britain, with its busy cities. He was not on vacation. He needed to find subscribers so that he could pay for the publication in book form of his paintings. The security and well-being of his family depended upon this quest, which was ultimately successful and launched his spectacular four-volume
Birds of America
.