Happiness is a far more vague word than truth. Happiness one feels; truth one senses after distance and consideration. Happiness is a composition and mingling of moments, a realignment of the past with the present. When I experience a situation that rings with truth, however, it is like a stone wall, immovable, implacable, cold and indifferent. Happiness and sadness alike are made of cascading memories sent tumbling through the present by some interloping impression. Truth exists alongside time, both endlessly and recklessly destroy and create. Truth and happiness have nothing to do with each other, though they touch at so many common points. I’m not trying to philosophize about it, I don’t care to define either, I will use both words as they suit me.
I am watching the shadows of tall trees shaking in the wind. The sun is hot and bright and the shadows are strewn across the tables and the walk and the faces of the people talking and eating. I watch the entanglement of shadows writhe and dance across the brow of a young man talking to a pretty young girl. I watch them smear and distort, darkened as if by ink. A man next to them is almost snoring. I myself am holding a book in my hand and drinking tea and noting the dancing limb-shadows, the violent leaf-shadows that no one else seems to notice. I look at people as I look at myself, as filters of experience who either are crushed or uplifted by what they have known, either made weaker or stronger than the quality of their original nature. Surrounded by people, I wonder at their happiness, I try to read their story in their faces; I listen to how they speak and what they speak about.
“The singing women approached Levin, and it seemed to him that a thundercloud of merriment was coming upon him. The cloud came over him and enveloped him; and the haystack on which he lay, and all the other haystacks and carts, and the whole meadow with the distant fields all started moving and heaving to the rhythm of this wild, rollicking song with its shouts, whistles and whoops. Levin was envious of this healthy merriment; he would have liked to take part in expressing this joy of life. But he could do nothing and had to lie there and look and listen. When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him.”
““How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange mother-of-pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds that stopped right over his head in the middle of the sky. “How lovely everything is on this lovely night! And when did that shell have time to form? A moment ago I looked at the sky, and there was nothing there- only two white strips. Yes, and in that same imperceptible way my views of life have also changed!””
“He left the meadow and walked down the main road to the village. A slight breeze sprang up, and it turned grey, gloomy. The bleak moment came that usually precedes dawn, the full victory of light over darkness.”
“He looked at the sky, hoping to find there the shell he had admired, which had embodied for him the whole train of thoughts and feelings of the past night. There was no longer anything resembling a shell in the sky. There, in the inaccessible heights, a mysterious change had already been accomplished. No trace of shell was left, but spread over half the sky was a smooth carpet of ever diminishing fleecy clouds. The sky had turned blue and radiant, and with the same tenderness, yet also with the same inaccessibility, it returned his questioning look.”
I am reminded of the first time I appreciated the night sky when I was young, on the bank of the
I am isolated in this memory; it lingers behind every experience since. These singular memories, perhaps meaningless to another, but resounding within me with all the force of life, these partitioned moments, when wonder starts in stillness; instants that stand solidly apart from happiness or sadness, points that sound deeply in strange and inaccessible tongues and tones... stone-like truth.
