“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic.” — David Foster Wallace
I’ve heard it said before that each poet has a primary emotion from which they write. Mary Oliver would be characterized as relief, while Richard Siken would be panic. I wondered what feeling I write from. It certainly isn’t happiness.
The nature of happiness is fleeting. The moment I realize I’m happy is the exact same moment it starts to leave me. I’ve learned over my life not to look at it too closely. I’ve come to believe that if I don’t, it might stay a little longer.
Happiness is a wallflower.
But this, I think, contributes to me assigning more weight to those feelings that are less comfortable—sadness, melancholy, confusion, hopelessness. This letter is at least in part an attempt to balance the scale.
I was helping a friend recently with a project. He was performing a wedding and wanted to read a love poem at the ceremony, and asked me to help him find one. I was happy for the challenge, and distraction. While sifting through my collection, however, I realized I do not read many love poems. There are a few exceptions, of course—Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke With You” is probably the greatest love poem ever written—but my shelves are not filled with poems professing love.
When I told my friend this, he wanted to know why.
‘I think I just have an affinity for the sad stuff more than I do the happy stuff,’ I wrote. ‘It’s like how I don’t really write about happy things. I don’t feel the need to because I’m just busy being happy. I do write the sad stuff because I need to decipher it; to get through it.’
He said it was one of the best arguments he’s heard for the theory that the natural state of human beings is to be happy.
But I was at least a little wrong. It’s not that I have a greater affinity for the melancholy, though I am a sucker for it. It’s that I have such an affinity for the happy that I don’t want to jinx it. Writing about it, acknowledging it, will make it disappear. I don’t know how to keep it, and more than anything I wish we could keep it.
What is left in mystery, buried underneath, is often more important than what we give voice to.
“What an odd thing a diary is: the things you omit are more important than those you put in.” — Simone de Beauvoir
This is how you know that happiness is the essential feeling. We’re afraid we’ll lose it by speaking it out loud. The older I get, the more life I live, the more I find that I love. Maybe I’m just desperate for something good, maybe I’m turning soft, maybe I’m finally tearing down a few walls I built, but I am getting better at recognizing when I’m happy. I’m getting better at not panicking when happiness inevitably leaves again.
Life is cyclical. Love is cyclical. Happiness is cyclical.
The most vulnerable of emotions is not sadness or hurt or fear. The most vulnerable we are as human beings is when we’re letting another person in on our happiness. It’s scary because happiness can (and will) be ripped away from us. To not be forthright when we’re happy is a disservice to happiness though. Keeping it to ourselves doesn’t do it justice. Our feelings demand that we give credit where credit is due.
So let it come and let it go. And let it come again.
I can’t tell you what happiness is, or even what it isn’t. All I know is that when it comes to me I don’t want to waste my time writing about it. I want to simply be it. So if you’ll allow me one moment of being earnest, and maybe a bit pathetic, I want to tell you that I am, in the midst of everything, happy.