Other people’s words about … happiness

Ivan closed his eyes. He tried to remember what it was like when [he and Goran] were good and together and all right. He tried to imagine what it was like the first time they met on the app and made plans to see each other outside the auditorium at night. They’d stood on the bridge and looked at the lights of the auditorium, gold and tiered like a delicate rock formation. Then they’d walked around the river path and talked all night about music, about ballet, about where they spent their afternoons, best place for coffee, how to dodge the undergrads.
That night had been so good, like something out of a dream. And they were so far from it now.
‘I can’t make you happy,’ Ivan said.
‘You do make me happy. This is me happy. I am happy.’
‘This can’t be happiness. If this is you happy, then I don’t think I understand what happiness is for.’
‘Sometimes happiness is just letting people feel how they fucking feel,’ Goran said.
He looked the furthest thing from happy. He looked pissed off. He looked annoyed. He looked like he was going to cry. His eyes welled. He bit at the inside of his jaw, then sat down sharply at the kitchen table, trying to catch his breath. Ivan sat down next to him, reached for his hand, and for the first time in a very long time, Goran let him.

from ‘The Late Americans‘
by Brandon Taylor

I’ve been fighting a battle with fleas for the last couple of weeks. This might seem like a random thing to write about after quoting Brandon Taylor’s words about happiness (and love … and life), but somehow it feels directly related.

Lizzie, my rescue cat, the cat who went from living in the garden and not letting me touch her to jumping up on my lap every night and curling up on top of me to go to sleep, started scratching ferociously a few weeks ago. Because I’ve never had a cat before; because I didn’t have any bites or itches myself (and still don’t); because, in all the years I had dogs,they never once got fleas; because, before I moved house a couple of years ago, Lizzie herself had never had fleas; because I thought (wrongly, as it turns out) that, since my house has bare wooden floorboards throughout instead of carpet, it was flea-proof — because of all these things, it took me a while to figure out that the cause of her scratching was fleas.

Semaphore Jetty, August 2023.

She’s far more domesticated than she was when she arrived in the garden of my old house three years ago, but still, a rescue cat is a rescue cat, and there are times when she likes to be touched and times when she doesn’t, times when you can pick her up and times when you can’t. So it took me several days to get her to take the medication, and several days more to get her to allow me to start combing her with a fine-toothed flea-comb. I flea-bombed the main room about two weeks ago, and since then, I’ve been vacuuming every day — every day, God, every day — and slowly, slowly I am getting on top of them.

What has this got to do with the passage I’ve quoted today from Taylor’s wonderful third book, The Late Americans? In part, it has to do with something I mentioned here a while back, some good news I had earlier this year. Astute readers might have guessed when I mentioned it that my news is writing-related, which it is, although I still can’t tell you the details yet because they’re still embargoed. It’s a small thing, a very small thing — a very, very small thing — and yet it’s made me feel part of the publishing world again in a way that I haven’t for over a decade. In this sense, though in a very small way, it’s something that I’ve dreamed of and longed for for a long time.

Spring flowers in the Scrub, September 2023.

And yet. Has my year been any happier because of this news? In a big-picture way, yes. But in a small-picture way, in my everyday life — no. (No, no, no.) Happiness still eludes me. I am not unique in this, I realise. Still, in these past few weeks, as I vacuumed the house and combed my cat and put on load after load of laundry, I found myself returning to Taylor’s words over and over. This is me happy. And: If this is [me] happy, then I don’t understand what happiness is for.

Why do we search for happiness in this way? Why do we expect it, even? I don’t know. I can’t tell you. And still Taylor’s words ring in my ears.

Lately I’ve been reading …

• • For many practitioners, ECT is still seen as worth the risk: Astrid Landon on whether ECT works or not, and what its dangers are.
  
  
  • That was the moment where I accepted that I have the kind of brain that loves to prepare for bad news and thus is wholly unprepared for good news or, in fact, great, incredible news: I read Sarah Thankum Mathews’s novel All This Could Be Different a few months ago and loved it. Here she is, in interview with Emily Gould, on writing the wrong novel for seven years before throwing it out, on why this novel might be a once-in-a-life writing experience for her, and on why the two things that stand in the way of her writing are self-doubt and rent.
  
  
  • Swimming isn’t something you can be taught just by following the rules. You have to figure out how to move intuitively and you have to want it. Middle age isn’t something you can prepare for adequately. You have to figure out how to move through it intuitively and you have to endure it: Diane Mehta on swimming to ease her pain, on growing older, on Henry James, on Whitman … and on life.
  
  
  • I used to love exercise, weight training specifically. Every few months I would train my way up to trying to beat my personal best deadlift. If and when I achieved it, I would clench my fist and say ‘yes Derek!’ And that was that. Working hard and achieving the goal was enough — there was no need for external recognition. Not so with books, it seems: In another exercise-related piece, Derek Owusu speaks about writers and their need for external validation … or not.
  
  
  • Like Tennessee Williams’s Blanche Dubois, I want magic. It might be found in the enchantments of a novel’s style, the elegance of a scholar’s mind or simply the excitement of learning something new. So I try a few pages of this book and that, restlessly hoping to start one that finally keeps me spellbound: Michael Dirda on how to read. While I’d quibble with his preference for hardcover books over paperback and am outraged at his dislike of the plastic covers that librarians use to protect their books and his insistence in pencilling in notes in the margins, we have many habits in common as booklovers.