Last year, to mark the United Nations International Day of World Happiness, on March 20th, the EU’s Eurobarometer ranked Ireland among countries with the highest quality of life. We are meant to infer that we are happy.
It may be imprudent to assume that happiness and quality of life are unrelated, although I suspect you can have one without the other – and, indeed, neither can be easily defined by the other.
It is fatuous to suggest that material needs are irrelevant to contentment. Tet happiness is more private, more personal than this. It is an inner quality with an outward expression. You can tell a happy person by their gait, their bodily attitude, their willingness to smile, their easiness in their own skin. You might mistake it for nonchalance.
Happiness is a bit like grace: it’s a gift. You receive it when you release your hold on worry and attachment. It’s a letting go more than a grasping. It’s a childlike sense of wonder at the variety of experience still available to us.
In Tristia the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam wrote: "O indigence at the root of our lives, / how poor is the language of happiness!"
That seems to be true. In literature we have long passages given to rapture and joy. They concern the great outdoors, the sea, sex, beauty. They applaud the scenery, the climate, birdsong and heaving bosoms. You find them in Melville, Austen, Lawrence, James and Eliot, but happiness is a different animal to joy.
The tutor of a writing workshop I attended told the class that in order to write you had to have something happen, and then something else had to happen, and so on. It was the happenings that created the story.
When we relate our own story we tell it through a succession of happenings. But what’s left out, I suggest, is the simple happiness of the ordinary in the gaps between the happenings. It’s no coincidence that both words have the same root.
I realise that, for many, happiness is elusive. There is too much loss or grief or anxiety or ill health, but even these people may have known periods in their lives when there was happiness. It is centred on love, I think, and is a feeling of ease and reconciliation.
When I was a child I worried that there was no roof on the world, that we were all exposed to the great abyss of the universe. But I also recall the words of TE Hulme in his poem Embankment: "Oh, God, make small / The old star-eaten blanket of the sky / That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie."
I’m not religious, although I feel an urge to both rail and be grateful. I’m careful not to confuse happiness with smugness or elation or a lack of empathy. That said, we need to further explore the language of happiness.
In Snow, by Louis MacNeice, the poet contemplates the multiplicity of sensations both within the living room and without in the garden: "There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses." Here "more" refers to the exquisite taste of tangerine, the great bay window, the bubbling sound of a fire flaming, the spawning flakes , the pink flowers, the "drunkenness of things being various".
Coming into the summer now, we can expect a barrage of colour in our gardens. At the heart of the experience of the ordinary lies happiness, and it remains unmeasured by the UN.
Isabelle Cartwright is a member of the Association of Freelance Editors, Proofreaders and Indexers
