A Private History of Happiness (24 page)

He was in fact so moved by it that he made a scene out of bathing in the novel
Count Robert of Paris
a few years later. A wounded and sickly knight is being prepared for a great battle with much care: “‘Transport him instantly to a suitable apartment, only taking care that it be secret, and let him enjoy the comforts of the bath and whatever else may tend to restore his feeble animation—keeping in mind, that he must, if possible, appear tomorrow in the field.’” Scott himself was soon facing his own (financial) battle, but for this night he was restored by his own comforts of the bath.

Ptah-Hotep, scribe, completing his book of sayings

EGYPT
• CA. 2400 BCE

Upon thee [the reader] many days the sun shall shine,

And length of years without default be thine.

Wisdom has caused me, in high place, to live

Long on the earth, a hundred years and ten,

I found the favour that a king can give,

First, for life’s labour, honoured amongst men.

Since the late nineteenth century, the precepts of the Egyptian scribe Ptah-Hotep have been regarded as one of the oldest preserved written texts of humankind. While the dating varies, this book of sayings is certainly more than four millennia old.

The author was a high official in the Egyptian state and may well have been the man named Ptah-Hotep who was vizier at some point during the Fifth Dynasty. In his book, he gave advice on many different topics. He considered the problem of how to relate to superiors in a rigidly hierarchical society. He even discussed the best way of handling powerful people if one had received the honor of dining with them. He talked about life in marriage and the kindness between husband and wife. He praised home education. He counseled hard work, but not too much: do not waste all the daylight for the sun will set soon enough anyway.

Ptah-Hotep’s circumstances were very different from ours. Some of what he said in his book now seems strange or even cruel. But there is a core of everyday experience that we can recognize. Even if the solutions have changed, some of the problems are familiar.

His own life is only visible in the background and in the choice of examples he wrote about. He must have been married from the way he talks about the life of husband and wife. He had a strong feeling for the relationship between parents and children. Perhaps at times this has tempted modern translators to make him sound too
familiar, but still, he did share some of our deepest interests and concerns in life.

At the very end of this book of sayings, after all the advice had been given, Ptah-Hotep presented himself to his audience as if in common politeness. He wished his readers well in their own lives and promised prosperity for those who followed his advice. Then he reviewed his own days.

The wisdom that he had now generously shared with others had made his own life successful. He had spent it “in high place.” Having been careful with his health, he had managed “to live long on the earth.” Can we believe that he reached the age of 110? Perhaps like all of those who give good advice, he was tempted to exaggerate his own success in order to endorse his message! Yet the feeling is touching, whatever we decide about the actual age.

Here was a man, well over 4,000 years ago, pausing to review his own life. He was old, certainly. He had worked a lifetime. If he did have children, he would have seen them grow up. He had “found the favour” of his king, as far as that was possible. He had become “honoured amongst men.” He could look back on an almost completed journey. And he did so with contentment, a touch of happiness: recognizing that it was, when almost all was said and done, a good enough life.

Here then was a man striving to come to terms with the approaching end of his days, when after the many sunrises, there would be darkness. He was realistic. He was also generous, wishing other people lives as long and fruitful as his own had been. He was able to feel happy about his own days in the sun, and so he could feel positive about other people who were to live after him. His happiness was no different from ours.

William Blake, poet and artist, writing a letter to a friend

FELPHAM, WEST SUSSEX
• SEPTEMBER 23, 1800

We [Blake and his wife, Catherine] are safe arrived at our cottage without accident or hindrance, though it was between eleven and twelve o’clock at night before we could get home, owing to the necessary shifting of our boxes and portfolios from one chaise to another [. . .] We travelled through a most beautiful country on a most glorious day. Our cottage is more beautiful than I thought it, and also more convenient, for though small it is well-proportioned, and if I should build a palace it would be only my cottage enlarged. Please to tell Mrs. Butts [the wife of his correspondent Thomas Butts] that we have dedicated a chamber for her service, and that it has a very fine view of the sea [. . .] The sweet air and the voices of winds, trees, and birds, and the odours of the happy ground, make it a dwelling for immortals. Work will go on here with Godspeed.

William Blake is now celebrated as one of the major English poets and as a distinguished artist, whose engravings illustrated his own mythological poems in a uniquely harmonious vision in two media. He was born in London’s Soho area in 1757 and began his working life in around 1772 as an apprentice engraver. In 1782, he married Catherine Boucher, and they formed a close relationship that endured till his death in 1827. By the time of this letter to his dear friend Thomas Butts, he had already composed some of his best-known works, including the dual collection
Songs of Innocence and Experience
. But his life was still a struggle, especially financially, and he was glad to receive the invitation of the writer William Hayley to move to a cottage arranged by Hayley in his home village on England’s south coast, where the plan was for Blake to illustrate Hayley’s poems while pursuing his own projects.

As a Londoner, William Blake expressed a sense almost of new birth on arriving in this rural setting, within view of the sea. The journey had been grueling. They had set off from London on Thursday, September 18, between six and seven in the morning, and it took
them seven changes of carriage and driver to reach their cottage in the hour before midnight on Saturday the 20th. But when he wrote back to his friend in London, Blake recalled with pleasure the last day’s traveling, when they began to pass through that “most beautiful country.” It had been a “most glorious day,” perhaps not only in weather and scenery but also in a sense of hope that he began to feel.

He had never seen the cottage before, and when he was able to view it properly, he was cheered by the same feeling of beauty that he had experienced in the surrounding countryside. To find a beautiful place to live, after the gloom of the city that he depicted in such famous poems as “London,” was for Blake a source of profound well-being. His art and writing were animated by a unified vision of beauty and joy and innocence, and this new home felt like the perfect setting in which to pursue his vocation.

In the capital, he had lived his life against the grain of what he felt to be an ugly and inhumane place; now that strain was relieved. Here in Felpham, he felt, there would be harmony between his own being and the world around him instead. The “sweet air and the voices of winds, trees, and birds” were the natural complement to the world of Blake’s imaginative vision. This consonance found expression in his confidence that “work will go on here with Godspeed.” And indeed, he went on to compose the celebrated passage in his epic poem
Milton
about “England’s green and pleasant land” in this pastoral home.

Looking ahead, the promise was not entirely to be fulfilled. He and Catherine left Felpham in 1804, after the trauma of Blake’s being tried for treason (and acquitted) following a fracas with a soldier in their cottage garden at Felpham during which he had cursed both the army and the monarch at a time of intense official suspicion about revolutionary conspiracies. They felt it necessary to return to London.

Yet in this first moment of arriving at the cottage, when he seemed to have found a genuine spiritual home, the poet experienced a depth of harmony with the world around that he had not known before. It brought him a few years of great inspiration and a vision of positive being that continued to nurture his spirit in adversity. Mortality haunted Blake, but here in Felpham he found an interlude from that fear, a “dwelling for immortals.”

Sappho, poet and musician, composing a lyric poem

THE ISLAND OF LESBOS
• CA. EARLY SIXTH CENTURY BCE

And round about the breeze murmurs cool through apple boughs, and slumber streams from quivering leaves.

These words are the translation of a fragment of poetry that was written down over 2,500 years ago by the great poet Sappho, who was born on the Greek island of Lesbos in the latter part of the seventh century BCE. She lived mainly on her native island and also probably for a time in exile in Sicily. (So she might have written this piece of poetry while being there.) She was renowned in her life as a musician as well, even being credited with the invention of the lyre. Images often show her playing this instrument. Her poems were probably songs and they were highly regarded for many centuries among the Greeks and the Romans. But later much of Sappho’s work was lost, or was only preserved via quotations in other books. Eventually, Victorian archaeologists rediscovered many fragments, written on papyri and preserved in an excavated ancient rubbish heap in Egypt.

These, then, are words that have hovered on the very edge of oblivion, recording a moment in the ancient Mediterranean, its sensations and feelings.

The day is hot. A fresh breeze whispers in a shady grove of apple trees. It is a sleepy time when the eyes are closing in the sun. The fact that the rest of the poem is now missing seems to turn the images back into a very direct expression of personal experience. The moment hangs perfectly poised between hot sun and cool breeze, consciousness and sleep. The inside and the outside world become woven together, and sleepiness flows toward the poet from the trees. Happiness lies on the finely balanced edge where these opposites meet. In another moment it might be over—sleep might have come or the breeze might have died away. Such balance, making a moment perfect, cannot last beyond it.

This flash of happiness in a grove of apple trees on a hot day has been carried across the centuries by the creativity of a few words on a scrap of papyrus. It sounds improbable. Yet Sappho understood the power of her creativity. She knew her words could leap over the gaps of time. She wrote to a lover that through her words, “men, I think, will remember us even hereafter.” Such creativity, springing from the momentary happiness of being alive, could not help being self-aware. While her words expressed happiness, they contained an intense awareness of both mortality and eternity.