A Private History of Happiness (9 page)

On the way to Turkey, Busbecq met his predecessor coming home—whose reminiscences were not encouraging. He had been kept a virtual prisoner (and the severity of the conditions would mean that he died before reaching his native soil again). It was going to be a hard time at the sultan’s court.

The journey was in itself a long and difficult one, having all the anxiety of anticipation to contend with as well. Yet at “the last stage,” Busbecq was still awake to his surroundings. The locals approached them “with large nosegays of flowers.” This land seemed to have become one huge garden. Everywhere the flowers bloomed, and especially so “the narcissus, the hyacinth, and the tulipan.”

In fact, Busbecq wrote these letters at a later time, as a kind of memoir. They were addressed to his friend Nicholas Michault, a fellow diplomat. It may be that the description of the flowers blooming all around did not belong to that winter journey at all. He did visit this region at other times, when the flowers might more obviously have been flourishing. The ambiguous chronology only serves to emphasize the vividness of the impressions themselves. Perhaps he could not remember exactly when he had those experiences of the narcissus, hyacinths, and tulips. But he remembered perfectly what it felt like to encounter this land of gardens.

First there was the color, “to see them blooming” far and wide. Then there was “their fragrance,” so sweet and strong that it was “perfectly wonderful.” He recalled vividly the wave of scent as it met his senses. It was enough to make a man feel as if drunk!

The happiness of that moment was independent really of anything around it. This was the “great profusion” of the earth, reaching all of the human senses.

Busbecq knew about many of these flowers from classical literature if not from personal experience. But the tulip was new to him. At first, it seemed less fine than the narcissus and hyacinth because it had “little or no smell.” But the coloring was supreme, and there were so many shades of tulips!

Before all the negotiations and threats, there was this very human moment. For a European diplomat in the sixteenth century, the world often seemed like a vast battlefield, with armies maneuvering back and forth. But here, one man was able to see the land as a garden, and conversation as an exchange between people who loved the flowers growing there.

It took eight years for Busbecq to negotiate a viable truce. For much of that time, he was confined to the embassy in Constantinople. Yet such interludes of vividness, such glimpses of fragrance and color, were the true human legacy of a difficult decade in his life. The moments of happiness outlived the years of fear and struggle.

William Cowper, poet, writing a letter to a friend

OLNEY, BUCKINGHAMSHIRE
• JUNE 8, 1783

Our severest winter, commonly called the spring, is now over, and I find myself seated in my favourite recess, the greenhouse. In such a situation, so silent, so shady, where no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles presume to peep in at the window, you may suppose I have no interruption to complain of, and that my thoughts are perfectly at my command. But the beauties of the spot are themselves an interruption, my attention being called upon by those very myrtles, by a double row of grass pinks just beginning to blossom, and by a bed of beans already in bloom; and you are to consider it, if you please, as no small proof of my regard, that though you have so many powerful rivals, I disengage myself from them all, and devote this hour entirely to you.

William Cowper had a stormy and often unhappy life. Born in 1731, the son of an English clergyman, he had become a London lawyer, which did not fit his shy temperament. Unhappiness in love added to his natural melancholy, and in 1763 he attempted suicide. From this depression he was rescued by the friendship of the Unwin family. After Mr. Unwin died following a riding accident in 1767, Cowper, the widowed Mary Unwin, and her children moved together to the peaceful village of Olney near Huntingdon in eastern England. Cowper was a close friend of the Olney curate John Newton, who wrote the words of the hymn “Amazing Grace.” Despite this supportive environment, the poet suffered another serious collapse in 1773.

Then he discovered the two passions of his life. One was poetry, which he began to publish to great acclaim. The second was gardening. He cultivated melons in this greenhouse and was proud of the hotbed of cucumbers. He loved talking to professional gardeners and exchanging tips on planting. Now he was sitting in the greenhouse writing to his friend William Unwin, Mary’s son.

Spring was just ending. For William Cowper, it was a season of false hopes. To him, it was impossible to enjoy the garden when spring showers and chills were never far away. Now he had an early English summer day, and he could be confident that nothing would go wrong: “Our severest winter, commonly called the spring, is now over.” He was able to joke about the poor spring, though, with his low spirits, he really needed sunshine and warmth.

He felt as if he had just woken from a troubled sleep: “I find myself seated in my favourite recess, the greenhouse.” He had other hiding places, but this was his chosen spot. The greenhouse was his haven, a retreat from the dangers and difficulties of life. He was safe here, almost invisible, where “no human foot is heard, and where only my myrtles presume to peep in at the window.” He felt as if even the flowers were careful not to intrude on him.

It was not only the outer world that felt safe inside the greenhouse. Even more important, his mind was at peace here. He could think the thoughts that he wanted, unpressurized by worries—“my thoughts are perfectly at my command.” Tranquil feelings seemed to soothe his mind in the warm, quiet place where he was sitting. Often, in his troubled days, he had been unable to choose his thoughts in this peaceful way. To have his mind “perfectly at my command” was for William Cowper a moment of absolute happiness.

The only “interruption” from these chosen reflections was the sheer beauty of nature, the colors and shapes surrounding him. But he did not really want to avoid such distraction. Here both the outer and the inner world were welcoming and he was secure. For once at rest in mind and soul, he could write to his friend.

Michel de Montaigne, philosopher, writing in his travel diary

TIVOLI, ITALY
• APRIL 4, 1581

In Tivoli is to be seen the famous palace [Villa d’Este] and garden of the cardinal of Ferrara, a most exquisite piece of work [. . .]

This outburst of a countless number of jets of water [in the garden], turned on or off by a single appliance manipulated at some distant point, I had seen elsewhere during my travels, notably at Florence and Augsburg, as I have already recorded. Here real music is produced from a sort of natural organ, which always plays the same tune, by the means of water which falls with great force into a round vaulted recess where it disturbs the air and forces it to seek an exit, and at the same time supplies the wind necessary to make the organ pipes sound. Another stream of water turns a wheel fitted with teeth, which are set so as to strike in a certain order the keyboard of the organ, and the sound of trumpets is also counterfeited by the same agency [. . .]

There are many pools or reservoirs edged all round with stone balustrades, on the top of which are set divers high columns of stone, distant one from the other about four paces. From the summits of these pillars the water spouts forth with strong impetus, not upward, but down towards the water in the basin. All the jets, being turned inwards and facing one another, discharge the water into the tank with such velocity that, when the threads of water collide in the air, they let descend into the basin a thick and continual mist. The sun falling upon the same produces on the surface of the basin, in the air, and all round about, a rainbow so marked and so like nature that it in no way falls short of the bow seen in the sky. I saw nought to equal this elsewhere.

Michel de Montaigne was born near Bordeaux, in southwest France, in 1533. After many years of private study in philosophy and literature, he became a notable writer and philosopher, famed especially for his development of the essay as a literary form. In 1580, he published to great acclaim two volumes of these essays, and also went on
a tour round Europe, partly to try and revive his failing health (he had kidney stones). He kept a diary, which he did not intend to publish (though it enhanced his posthumous reputation when it was made public more than a century later). These were his private notes of a time intended for recovery and renewal.

The Villa d’Este in Tivoli, near Rome, was one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance garden design, equipped with the latest cunning technology. These water-powered machines were precursors of the Industrial Age, even though in this garden they were only toys.

Montaigne enjoyed the craft and ingenuity of the waterworks and contraptions. But he was only really stirred to passion by one sight. This was something special, worth the visit even when he was not really feeling well.

Toward the end of his garden tour, he noticed a kind of “upside-down” fountain, with jets firing the water down into the basin instead of throwing it up into the air. The result was an artificial mist, a fine cloud of watery vapor, enabling the sunlight to create a magnificent rainbow. Now this was something—a rainbow machine! It fitted Montaigne’s idea of happiness. Unlike the other machinery, which tried to compete with nature, this fountain was—intentional or not—a tribute to the unsurpassable beauty of the real rainbow.

Only at this spot in the great Renaissance garden, Montaigne must have felt, were nature and human creation in true harmony. What better than rainbows to bloom in this Italian masterpiece!

Oliver Wendell Holmes, poet and physician, writing a letter to three friends

BEVERLY FARMS, MASSACHUSETTS
• SEPTEMBER 2, 1885

My dear Friends
—I cannot make phrases in thanking you for your kind remembrance. I wish you could all have been with me on the 29th [of August, his birthday]; every flower of garden and greenhouse, and fruits that Paradise would not have been ashamed of, embowered and emblazoned our wayside dwelling.

Grow old, my dear Boys, grow old! Your failings are forgotten, your virtues are overrated, there is just enough of pity in the love that is borne you to give it a tenderness all its own. The horizon line of age moves forward by decades. At sixty, seventy seems to bound the landscape; at seventy, the eye rests on the line of eighty; at eighty, we can see through the mist and still in the distance a ruin or two of ninety; and if we reach ninety, the mirage of our possible centennial bounds our prospect.

Oliver Wendell Holmes had been a distinguished physician, a professor of anatomy and dean at Harvard University. He was a pioneer of the successful theory of infectious diseases. Yet he was also a well-known poet and acclaimed public speaker. Now he was writing a letter to three equally distinguished friends—James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton, and George William Curtis, who were themselves writers, academics, and public figures—about an experience on his seventy-sixth birthday, a few days previously.