A bliss that’s worth dying for
A quote in a travel feature about happiness didn't make much sense, until I went digging.
A few weeks ago, I was copy editing a travel feature for The Australian newspaper on the refurbished Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens, which ended with a quote from American writer Henry Miller's travelogue The Colossus of Maroussi, in which he recounts a journey through Greece just as the Second World War was about to break.
The quote reads:
It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how ... and still be happy, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss.
I was thinking about this quote for days, but every time I reflected on it, I couldn't decide what it was that was gripping me. I took copious notes, and began several articles for this newsletter, on everything from travelling through Greece as a kid with a sunburnt bottom, my accidental holiday in the wine district from the movie Sideways, Roger Waters' album Amused To Death, Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death, and a terrific article in The Atlantic about the kind of love that makes us the happiest (spoiler: it's friendship).
None of it would stick. Even as I started again this morning.
Then I realised it was because the quote actually doesn't make a lot of sense. It has an ellipsis, for a start, so there is something missing. And its context, at the end of a travel feature about a Four Seasons hotel, just seems out of place. Miller's talking about bliss, for crying out loud, not the self-satisfied feeling a journalist gets after a junket in refurbished lodgings on a pine-clad peninsula 30 minutes from the Acropolis.
So, I went back to the source of the quote — Miller's book. And found the key. And guess what, it’s not about bliss so much as the lack of it.
The context of the quote is a scene Miller describes in brilliant detail as he's pulling into the port of Patras, in the Peloponnese. Here's a section of it:
As you pull into port the little boats come out to meet you: they are filled with passengers and luggage and livestock; and bedding and furniture. The men row standing up, pushing instead of pulling. They seem absolutely tireless, moving their heavy burdens about at will with deft and almost imperceptible movements of the wrist. As they draw alongside a pandemonium sets in. Everybody goes the wrong way, everything is confused, chaotic, disorderly. But nobody is ever lost or hurt, nothing is stolen, no blows are exchanged. It is a kind of ferment which is created by reason of the fact that for a Greek every event, no matter how stale, is always unique. He is always doing the same thing for the first time: he is curious, avidly curious, and experimental. He experiments for the sake of experimenting, not to establish a better or more efficient way of doing things. He likes to do things with his hands, with his whole body, with his soul, I might as well say.
Miller then recalls that a friend in Paris, Mayo, or Malliarakis, told him one night: "Miller, you will like Greece, I'm sure of it". Miller remembers this as he watches the scene before him unfold, and realises, seeing the sky in a way he has never seen before, that he has "entered a new realm as a free man—everything had conjoined to make the experience unique and fructifying".
It's then that he writes: "Christ, I was happy. But for the first time in my life I was happy with the full consciousness of being happy."
I'll pause here just to reflect for a moment on that phenomenon ... of being happy, but also knowing exactly why you're feeling it. I hadn't ever thought of the distinction before, that you could be happy and not know why. But of course there's a distinction, and as Miller explains it, the knowing why becomes even more fulfilling than the feeling itself.
Here's what he says next; the full quote without the ellipsis:
It's good to be just plain happy; it's a little better to know that you're happy; but to understand that you're happy and to know why and how, in what way, because of what concatenation of events or circumstances, and still be happy, be happy in the being and the knowing, well that is beyond happiness, that is bliss ...
So, there it is, the quote in its fullness, which makes more sense in its original context, with the port scene fresh in our imagination, and Miller standing there on the boat as it pulls in, watching this chaotic but beautiful and unrepeatable scene play out in a way that fulfils his friend's prediction about him liking Greece, and knowing that the two things together, the prophecy and the actualisation, have produced a state of blissful contentment — a moment not unlike C.S. Lewis's experience of joy when he sees his brother's little garden in The Weight of Glory.
But there's a little more to the quote, and this is where it gets genuinely interesting. Somewhat shockingly, Miller says:
... and if you have any sense you ought to kill yourself on the spot and be done with it. And that's how I was—except that I didn't have the power or the courage to kill myself then and there. It was good, too, that I didn't do myself in because there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even; something which if anyone had tried to describe to me I would probably not have believed.
What the travel writer who finished their feature with Miller's quote couldn't say (because she hadn't felt it at the Four Seasons Astir Palace Hotel Athens) was that Miller's experience of bliss led him to thoughts of suicide. Why? Because it was as if he'd reached the apex of human experience, the zenith of happiness — and knowing that it was tied to a moment that would soon be over, he contemplated that he may as well be done with life because it was possible he'd never feel this way again.
And this is where I landed — not with my own reflections on travel or questions about the pursuit of happiness and whether it's worth it, but on the contemplation of moments of human joy that are so good they make you think life forever after will never reach those heights again. And what this resonates mostly with for me is not tied to travel so much, as moments of encounter with people. And while I've never had a moment with someone that's made me contemplate suicide out of the realisation that moment would never be equalled, I have had experiences that have led me to realise why fear, not hate, is the opposite of love. And it's because of what Miller experienced. Fear is love's opposite because when genuine moments of love have ended, fear that it will never happen in that way again takes its place — and the anxiety of that reality is almost greater than the bliss experienced in the moment.
Like Lewis observed, happiness, beauty, joy, are fleeting. We’re desperate to enter them, to be permanently embraced by them, but they don't let us in. They pass us by. And that lack can produce the desire, and the search, for more, and even the experience of more, or it can leave us feeling defeated and empty, perhaps even wishing we'd never experienced the bliss in the first place because at least ignorance would have made life easier.
But as Miller says, "there were even greater moments to come, something beyond bliss even". And that knowledge is the beginning of hope.
And for Miller, an even bigger realisation would occur:
Marvellous things happen to one in Greece—marvellous good things which can happen to one nowhere else on earth. Somehow, almost as if He were nodding, Greece still remains under the protection of the Creator. Men may go about their puny, ineffectual bedevilment, even in Greece, but God's magic is still at work …
The pursuit of happiness is like the addiction for more of what you enjoy. The fear is that what was once great becomes less with repeated doses. So unless the joy is always becomming more than the time before then the addiction which leads to the constant pursuit for more of the good stuff.....is just an addiction. There is a deep sadness in this understanding.... but still we will search for joy....and perhaps we must. Im an addict. But perhaps that is ok.