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What makes me happy now

‘Happiness can be ignited by making something
small infinite’: what makes me happy now
In a series of short essays, writers consider what happiness
means to them now, after the reckoning of the past few years
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Robert Dessaix
Sat 28 Jan 2023 19.00 GMT
I
t’s a nightmare, a barbaric farce. The city is first taken by Russians, then
by Ukrainians, then by Russians again; foreign forces join the struggle,
gangster hordes go on killing sprees, thousands are butchered, and a
plague engulfs the survivors. It’s Kyiv. The year is 1918.

A young nobody called Konstantin Paustovsky (fisher, paramedic, student) has

just arrived with an itch to write. He’s unusual: in the midst of the slaughter he
thinks about happiness. Decades later he will be nominated for the Nobel prize
for literature, but won’t, of course, get it. The happiness he thinks about is
always the wrong kind.

In Kyiv in 1918, for example, Paustovsky believed that the safest, the happiest
refuge from the avalanche of catastrophes engulfing his homeland lay in three
things: nature, domesticity and intimacy. As it happens, when the Covid
pandemic first struck in Australia, it was in a shack in the middle of “nature”
that our little family of two humans and a dog first sought refuge. Needless to
say, we didn’t live off nature, we didn’t forage, we just lived among the gum
trees. We hoped for comfort amid the chaos in small domestic tasks and
intimacy, enjoying the mild intoxication that comes from being unencumbered
by the unhappiness of the wider world. We “sucked on country pleasures,
childishly”, in the poet John Donne’s words in The Good-Morrow.

Eventually, Donne said, you really need to be weaned off

this sort of thing. In the 1950s, Americans, who have a right under their
constitution to “the pursuit of happiness”, came up with a similar formula:
vacuuming, baking and watching television, they hunted happiness down in
close-knit families on decent-sized, leafy acreages. It could be argued they have
never been fully weaned off these practices, remaining oddly infantile in their
tastes and behaviour to this day.

For a week or 10 days intimacy and the performance of household tasks in the
Tasmanian wilderness worked well for us. Then all of a sudden it palled.
Something was missing. Like Nimbin, it had an unexpected air of melancholy
about it. We had to think again. What sort of happiness was now possible? To be
honest, in the wake of the famines, droughts, flooding and wars that followed
the outbreak of the pandemic, the question itself began to seem frivolous.

It’s hardly a new problem, although some recent commentators, in their

It’s hardly a new problem, although some recent commentators, in their
excitement, have declared our sufferings “unprecedented”. They are actually
par for the course. Four hundred years ago, for instance, Robert Burton, the
author of the monumental Anatomy of Melancholy, was bemoaning the
ceaseless reports of “war, plagues, fire, inundations, thefts, murders,
massacres, meteors, comets and omens” afflicting England. Yet by all accounts
Burton was a cheery chap: writing his encyclopaedic work on every variety of
melancholy known to humankind being a brilliant antidote to the condition
itself. Art often is, but let’s not forget – that’s not what it’s for. Even the
Assyrians, two thousand years earlier, resorted to the arts, if the reliefs in the
British Museum are any guide. Despite the ferociously brutal rule of the
Assyrians and the endless droughts, floods, plagues and mass slaughter, some
people were apparently happy some of the time – falling in love, dancing,
writing poetry and composing music for their flutes and tambourines. There
they are in the reliefs. How could this be?

Knowing we
could die quite soon
means each moment
is unrepeatable.

Contentment is often within our grasp, but contentment is not happiness and
can never be complete in times such as these. You could feel bolts of happiness
during the blitz in London, for instance, but could rarely feel contentment. It’s
impossible now to be truly content anywhere in the world as Bangladesh goes
under water and Brazil is turned into a wasteland. After all, your own sense of
ease and tranquillity is always contingent on other people’s.

From time to time, however, even in the direst situation, even knowing what
we know about the waves of violence and disease washing over the planet like
some cosmic curse, we can certainly be happy – even ecstatically. If the last few
years have taught us anything, it’s that happiness and sadness, even misery can
go together. I have a friend in Yogyakarta who could not sleep for months
during the first Delta Covid wave because of the sirens of ambulances rushing
the dying to hospital. Yet there was also happiness: a new grandchild, a
blossoming close friendship, reading Turgenev at dusk in the garden – love, in
other words. What else? Donne would not have been surprised. Happiness is
other words. What else? Donne would not have been surprised. Happiness is
like being struck by lightning: the storm merely heightens it. Knowing we could
die quite soon means each moment is unrepeatable.

It seems to me more and more now that what invites a bolt of happiness to
strike is a heightened need to be creative. I wrote and made new friendships,
which takes an artist’s minute attention. When the mind is focused on finding a
balance between what it feels deep inside itself in the pond of memories and
what it sees and hears and even smells, all around it, there is a sudden radiance
that has nothing to do with contentment but is happiness.

When the I behind the eye is illuminated in a flash of new perception – of

feeling, understanding, resolution – something flares up that I would call
happiness. The flash won’t last, of course, that would be unbearable, it will dim,
but so what? There will be an afterglow. Our inner selves are like pieces of
music, Eva Hoffman writes in her study of time (called Time) – “patterned
performances, made up of micromovements, like a gamelan composition”.
During isolation one had the time to hone a virtuoso performance.

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One of the opportunities the pandemic offered us was to consider time afresh.
After all, inhabiting time well, rather than befuddling ourselves with notions of
either immortality or the pointlessness of everything, is one of the keys to a
happy life. It’s not easy. I recognise now that all the things that make us happy
happen in time: falling in love, escapes from the domestic, finding paradise, or
creating beauty (gardens, paintings, connections). There is, as Hoffman puts it,
“a right rhythm and scale of lived experience – of being-in-the-world – which
we need to find for ourselves for the sake of our wellbeing”. The rooted kind of
we need to find for ourselves for the sake of our wellbeing”. The rooted kind of
existence that became the norm in recent years made it easier to acquire “a
right rhythm”, which opened the door to unthought-of happiness, not just
fulfilment or pleasure, but something more dynamic: bursts of happiness.

Finding the inner world more reliable than the outer one, some people I know
started to dally with Buddhism, adopt rescue dogs and join choirs. The dogs
and choirs show promise, I think, while the Buddhist notion of achieving bliss
either through eradicating desire or embracing the non-self has never appealed
strongly to me. In my experience, wanting, and either getting or deliciously not
getting what I’ve wanted, has been the very stuff of life. Besides, I’ve been
visiting Buddhist strongholds from Dharamsala to Cambodia for most of my
life, but have seen little sign in any of them that the secret to happiness has
been found – to tranquillity perhaps, but not happiness. Nor do I even now, in
the face of cosmic annihilation, see much point in “living in the moment” like a
blowfly or a dementia patient, although it’s a cliche people still toss around.
Living in time now seems a more realistic, more rhythmic, more joyful
framework for a good life than striving to transcend it in the hope of a selfless
immortality.

Actually, what Robert Burton, John Donne and Eva Hoffman all accentuate in
their writing and in their lives is the happiness ignited by making something
small infinite. Burton’s obsession with melancholy was almost infinitely
enriched by his boundless curiosity in the wider world – in everything from
Christianity to astrology, astronomy, Latin poetry and Peruvian goldmines.
Donne expressed it differently: love for a beloved, he writes in The Good-
Morrow, especially as he wakes with her in the morning, “makes one little room
… an everywhere”. And this is what I’ve learned: to cross Himalayan passes or
do the tango or dream of Venice by all means, but also learn to do it in the
intimacy of the “little room” where my heart is anchored, my “everywhere”. It’s
almost impossible, but, in my experience, worth a shot.

Robert Dessaix is the author of Night Letters, Twilight of Love, and