And Again

“My friends, what is happiness?” – thus I asked this diverse little crowd, and each man poured his own heart in words:

Happiness is getting what you want when you want it.

Happiness is getting away from yourself – transcending yourself.

Happiness is being yourself, continually striving for and sustaining yourself.

Happiness is nothing more than pleasure – the negation of pain.

Happiness is being with that particular person who you can grow old with – love, really, erotic love.

Happiness – no, it’s more along the agapas the Greeks understood: universal love for men.

Happiness – no, no, it’s nothing more than doing God’s will.

Happiness is the feeling of power, of overcoming, of movement towards perfection. And God does not exist.

I felt myself involuntarily walk up that spectrum of tenseness, each gradation according to each infinitely different answer, from the fat man with generalizations, from the skinny man with particularizations, some with pride dancing in their eyes, others with a eyes whose darkness was a razor to my own, for I had dared to ask that question that no man who has fallen from the clouds of euphoria would dare ask: what is happiness? Apparently there was no answer, and we all didn’t have it. So it went. But as that settling malaise wrapped its wretched wings around this congregation of philosophers – common men with uncommon curiosities – like a constellation around me, I felt my mind quicken under the whiplash of intuition: someone was missing. No – yes – yes, there surely was a shadow sitting where a man once dwelt, and so –- I looked around to find him: nothing. I stood up, resigned my seat, and decided to take a brief walk outside, to catch the fresh air. The coolness of the air greeted me, the sun burned my eyes, and –-

There he was: slightly slouched against a lawn chair, middle-aged with shy streaks of gray appearing here and there in faint places on his head, on the border of the concrete of my back porch which edged the fresh grass now kissed by the dying wind. The look on his face –- serene; the distance of his eyes –- infinite. He was evidently looking at everything, therefore nothing at all, possessed by some strange absorption, as if Aphrodite had danced calmly before his eyes. I wasted no time:

“My dear friend,” my voice clearly a sin against the sanctity of the moment, “what is happiness?”

Silence, and then: “Happiness?” He turned my way to admit my existence, with a warm look in his eyes.

“Yes, happiness,” I paused, in slight confusion at the perplexity that subtly revealed itself in his brow, “there are a million different men in there who have a million different answers, and if life isn’t a road whose end is happiness, I see no reason to live.”

“Happiness,” he spoke again, a half-sigh, half-reproach, not quite in response, but as if speaking parallel with my own voice, then he quickened up; his eyes finally drifted away from his previous target; he focused on my face, and –- the oddness! -– smiled, and so childishly! “Happiness,” for the third time, still with the exact same lethargic emphasis, as if it was merely a grain of sand among hundreds that he was letting fall through his fingers, “that, my friend, is a word that means nothing at all.”

An incomparably angelic look poured from the unity of his features as he again looked out, again lost focus, again swam in his own thoughts, as they swam with the immaculate wonder that nature had brought before us; and I – I rubbed my eyes, like a man in the dark spontaneously flashed with light, ruffled my hair, felt that preternatural stranglehold whose hands I knew not bid me adieu, and left him alone, with a devilish thought to start the house on fire and save the poor men inside from a life of revolting futility.