The great unabridged Oxford English Dictionary contains half a million words. Among all these one of the two most difficult to define is “happiness.” It is easy enough to find a purely verbal definition such as “a feeling of pleasure or contentment” but that is superficial. Any state of mind is hard to describe but happiness is perhaps the hardest. It is not necessarily associated with any physical state – the possession, for instance, of wealth or power or high position or beauty or outstanding skill. Indeed, often enough, the actual possession of wealth, power, position, genius, or the adulation which beauty attracts, drives happiness away and leaves behind a feeling of sated discontent, a yearning for something even more . Happiness – it is a will-o-the-wisp which as soon as you grasp at it, it disappears.
In Mary Renault’s lovely novel, The Persian Boy, she has the young Alexander the Great give the best definition I have read: “What is happiness?” Alexander asks. And he answers himself “To have achieved one’s longing, perhaps. But also, when all one’s mind and body are stretched to breaking, when one hasn’t a thought beyond what to do the next moment – one looks back, and there it was.”
That is part of it, and yet not the whole of it. In the end happiness is indefinable. I am not a very religious person but I see that in the end it may have something to do with what old Sir Thomas Browne was getting at when he wrote in the 17th Century:
“There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before
the elements and owes no homage to the sun.”
And there resides, perhaps, the source of misery or happiness in all of us.
The other most difficult of words to define is of course “truth”. Who can say he knows the whole truth about anyone or anything? What is true in one place may be false in another. What is true for one person may be error for his brother. The phrase “gospel truth” describes what is considered the most certain truth of all yet students of biblical times are the first to tell us that little historical truth can be drawn from the Gospels. The trial of Jesus before Pilate described in the Bible is most unlikely to have resembled the actual court transcript. These are also grave inconsistencies in the Gospel accounts of, for instance, the last Supper, the siting of the Easter appearances, the baptism of Jesus and the character of Peter. Gospel truth turns out not to be truth at all.
It is because there is no such fountain of truth from which we can draw with certainty that in daily life each individual must be given as many facts as possible and then left to judge for himself. Any belief that there is some final repository of truth leads inevitably to fanaticism, hatred, unjustified repression, and bitter political and social strife.
These thoughts have been provoked by something very simple. I get a fair number of letters and comments about my articles and by far the most, whether they agree or do not agree, are couched in courteous and reasoned terms which make them a pleasure to consider. But sometimes you do get one or two full of venom and in these all too often can be seen the ugliness and danger of those who believe they alone have access to ultimate truth.
Far more often than not it is such people who fall back on the oldest threat of all fanatics – censorship. “You should not be allowed to say such things”, they write or say. “You should shut up or you should be shut up.”
Well, such correspondents so far have been very few. When I think it may be worthwhile to make a reply I tend to quote our old friend Sir Thomas Browne again, for he wrote very wisely on the subject when he said:
“I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an
opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with me in
that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myself.”
In the meanwhile, pending the end of the world and the final revelation of what is truth with a big T, what can one do, what can any man do, but express the truth as he sees it and be prepared to accept that there will always be other views to consider and respect?
And at this point we come around again full circle to happiness. Because does not happiness derive at least partly from peace of mind? And does not peace of mind consist very considerably in being able to express an honest opinion without it leading to that terrible degree of rancor which denotes a society long gone in the process of dividing itself to the ultimate detriment of all?
