Happiness Elsewhere

Just less than five years ago, I bought tickets to see a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Piccadilly Theatre. I wanted to see it because the production starred Wendell Pierce, who I love, and also because I remembered the play having such an impact on me when I first read it as a student.

The play is about the American Dream, about the aspirations held and pressures faced by Willy Loman, the travelling salesman who, in the play, is beginning to buckle under the weight of his responsibilities and his failures to consistently meet sales targets. Happiness, for Willy Loman, is always at the end of striving — happiness is always contained in an imagined, future life that more often than not is accessed only after obtaining certain material goods or achieving particular goals.

I’ve been thinking of the play this week because this week my second novel, The Orange Room was published. Publishing a book is in equal parts joyous and terrifying, not only because it is exposing — you have put your words and your dreams out into the world — but also because what you have been striving for, what you have been working for so long to create, is no longer yours. Those words, that story, the fictional world you’ve built is no longer a place that is filled with possibility and potential, a place where you can hide. Instead, temporarily, you have to exist in the world.

Capitalism’s answer to rationalism, to the existential angst that might otherwise be soothed by religious faith and a belief in an afterlife, is to invite paradise into the earthly realm. It is now possible access everlasting happiness — the kind traditionally offered by organised religion — via the purchase of goods, property, material things. By the progression of your career, the bloating of your bank account. And sure, the economy might be tanking but you work hard enough and you’ll be the exception, don’t look around, focus on yourself, your individual achievements and happiness. Certainly, my generation were raised on this promise, and is as a result anxious and overworking, confused as to why the fruits of our very neurotic labour have turned out so rotten, why it is that despite destroying ourselves with work, housing security, job security, security in relationships and community and health remain beyond reach.

It is in this striving, this aspiring, in the ever-widening gap between what is expected and what is here, that depression tends to materialise. Discontentment occupies the space between two existences: dreamt-of, and real. The answer, of course, is to learn to look at what is here, and to value and appreciate it, but it’s so hard to do when our attention is continuously captured and projected forwards into a dreamed of, possible just out of reach future, into what’s next and not what’s here. Far easier said than done, to be present, enjoy the journey. When it comes to writing, a vocation that brings me its greatest fulfilment in the doing rather than the achieving, for the most part, I’m able for the most part to exist in that entirely pure pleasure of pulling sentences and images together on a page.

But even so, as I was forcibly reminded this week, it doesn’t stop me from putting pressure on the end result, for anticipating, however briefly, a particular, not-yet-experienced happiness that might exist over there, on the next page, in the next chapter.

It’s this torment, of course, that drives Willy Loman to despair. It is in striving, wanting, desiring, that unhappiness takes root, is allowed to flourish. The greater the want, the more unwieldy the unhappiness, and what is more human than to want?

I thought of the play this week, watching my novel going out into the world, to remind myself that the strange detachment I felt from it, the feeling, on opening up its pages for the first time in six months, having lived inside it for more than three years, (it having probably lived in me far longer than that), was a kind of peace. It had to do with no longer having particular, personal desires attached to this piece of work, because really, it’s not mine anymore, it belongs to whoever picks it up, whoever chooses to read it and interpret it and, however briefly, inhabit it.

I thought of the play, or, at least, I thought of that particular production of the play, and the particular circumstances in which I went to see it: it was November, I was in a relationship that was nearing its end. I’d bought the tickets because I wanted my then-partner and I to do something different, something to shake us from our routine. Both of us, I think, in our own ways, were unhappy because of wanting, neither of us particularly happy in ourselves and both, separately, finding that the gulf between our aspirations and our realities altogether too large. We were neither of us able to be quite content with ourselves, always looking towards some imagined and out of reach future for fulfilment.

So, that night, we went to the theatre. We collected our tickets, got our drinks, and we sat. I remember telling him why I’d liked the play, that it had reminded me that really the thing about happiness was that you had to remember that it wasn’t necessarily elsewhere. Of course, I was telling myself this too, and I don’t know if either of us was really capable of listening, capable of doing anything other than striving, and I don’t know whether he or we would have really got the point, whether it would have landed (though the play had received wall to wall five star reviews), because instead, that night, about twenty minutes into the play, the ceiling of the Piccadilly Theatre fell in, and we were evacuated, hurried up onto the streets by stewards while the handful of audience members who had been sitting below that caved-in part of the roof were tended to by paramedics. Nobody was seriously hurt beyond a minor concussion or two, and we never went back to see the play, though we were invited to a scratch performance a few weeks later. By that point, our relationship had taken its cue from the ceiling and also crumbled. (We would agree, years later, meeting again and both of us much happier, that it had of course been a sign.)

I thought of it this week because that ceiling falling in reminded me that one very effective way — aside from the very tiresome work of being present, of trying to appreciate what is here, now — to close that sometimes very painful gap between expectation and existence is to remember how easily our expectations of what life has in store for us are upturned. By disaster, sometimes, sure. Also sometimes tragedy. (As the poet Rilke tries to tell us, and I don’t know that we can always hear this: “Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love.”) Other times, though, our expectations are upturned not by disaster but by comedy. By joy, or by hope. And sometimes, by something far more marvellous than you, in your dreaming and wanting, could have imagined.