MY AMERICAN friends have been keeping their Independence Day with the usual fireworks and parties, but also, I think, with a good deal of soul-searching, as so many forces seem to be at work to polarise their society and alienate them from one another. Some of them have, quite properly, looked back to the original Declaration of Independence, which the day celebrates. It’s an inspiring but sometimes astringent experience to look afresh at one’s principles and foundations, and I suppose we do it, too, every time we open a Bible or the Book of Common Prayer.
Among the phrases from the Declaration which have been flitting across the pages of my social media is one that has always given me pause for thought, and, indeed, a certain uneasiness: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
This is a great statement and has done much good in the world; but the phrase that troubles me is “the pursuit of Happiness”. I’m not sure that happiness is, in itself, something that can be pursued. Rather, it is something that arises spontaneously and unlooked for in the midst of other pursuits. If one were constantly taking one’s own emotional pulse and saying “Is this happiness? Am I happy now?” that very self-analysis would destroy the conditions that make happiness possible.
Like her older sister, joy, happiness comes unbidden, unlooked for, and is almost always banished when our attention is on ourselves and not on something or someone else. It is when our friends are gathered, or our children are home from college and we are entirely absorbed in them, that we realise, almost as though taken by surprise, that we are happy.
When we are walking in the woods, completely absorbed in tracing the sound of some beautiful birdsong among the branches, we suddenly know that we are happy. We have not pursued happiness herself, but she has tiptoed up quietly beside us, when our attention was elsewhere, and given us an unexpected kiss.
My American friends are quite right to insist on the life and liberty, the freedom to enjoy the many pursuits that might lead to happiness; but happiness herself may, in Keats’s phrase, “still be coy, to those who woo her with too slavish knee”. I felt a little of this when I wrote my sonnet on joy, in my responses to all the phrases in Herbert’s poem “Prayer”:
Joy
How does she come, my joy, when she comes walking
Over the wasteland and the empty waves?
She comes unbidden between sleep and waking,
She comes like winter jasmine on cold graves,
She comes like some swift wind, she fills my sails,
And on we surge, cresting the wine-dark sea,
The fine prow lifting, as my vessel heels,
The tiller tugs and quivers, and I’m free
Of all the land’s long cares. As that brisk breeze
Sings in the thrill and tremor of taut stays,
So my heart’s rigging, tuned and taut as these,
Sings with the wind that freshens into praise.
For when Joy comes, however brief her stay,
She parts my lips, and I know how to pray.