It is half past eleven on a Saturday night. The whole city of Ghent is partying and even from my first floor window I can spot a crowd of revellers spilling out from the alluring depths of the Fleura Feufka – our extremely proximate local late-night drinking hole. I have come home at this hour to celebrate the inception of my new writing table – small, discrete, black – in my new room at Syrus’s house. So as you can imagine, much has changed in these past weeks.
The business of carrying the table – small though it is – back to my new address in Prinsenhof from the Afrikalaan by the industrial banks of the Handelsdock, was not a task to be sniffed at. In fact, my readiness to take on the challenge only highlighted to me how familiar I had become with carting around articles of furniture on the back of my bike from my year as a boater, when I owed one of those most glorious objects – a bike trailer. It was already dark at five o’ clock when I arrived at the large furniture warehouses on the Afrikalaan – I had only an hour in which to find the correct sort of desk and trundle it back to my new house, before the beginning of my late night shift at MacDougalls. It was a tight schedule; but as the shops close here on Sundays and Mondays, I had little choice; especially as the symbolic value of the desk (and my lack of it), began to accrue a painful significance to me. But of course my lack of desk was only a material excuse for the disheartening lack of work that I have been able to complete since I moved to Syrus’s house – and not the real reason for it. The real reason is perhaps simpler – and because of that, more dangerous – I have been happy.
It occurred to me about three weeks ago, that despite the occasional ups and downs – a feature of our human condition (how does Proust put it? A change of wind here; there; every moment) – I have been very happy in Ghent. This realisation even surprised myself, for in many ways my ‘position’ in society has descended – I have retreated back into the services industry, I do not have the same support network that I had in London and I was at that time living in one of the most undesirable areas of Ghent. Yet despite all of these apparent disadvantages, I felt really,authentically happy.
The shock of this discovery prompted me to reflect how direly depressed I must have been in London even with a good job and a home and a boyfriend – all the appurtenances, so they tell us, of the good life. I was lead to consider what it was about Ghent that was making me so happy. Of course, on one level it is the environment of Ghent: the beautiful, nefarious, medieval, disorganised, artistically enlivened spirit of the place; on another, my independence and sense of gratefulness for the meaningful social connections that I had managed to build up. But such things, I felt, were just supplements to the essential source of my happiness, which, when I pondered a little, I realised was two-fold. The essential reason for my happiness in this city – after all not so far from London– is firstly that I am really doing what I love – writing creatively and working on my own projects – and secondly, that I am free. I am free in Ghent and I am doing what I love. Who knew that the recipe for true human happiness was so simple?
It is fashionable these days to discuss happiness as a social theme. There was, I remember, an incredibly influential poll some years ago, in which statisticians drew up a kind of gross national product of happiness for each European country. It did not surprise me that the UK came very far down on this list, below, even some of the very poor Baltic countries. The reason for this is very simple and that is, that as far as I can tell, London is a place where not many people can boast that they are truly free and almost nobody is doing what they truly love. I had to move onto water to barter myself a kind of temporary freedom in the city – but now I realise that this freedom was only skin-deep. When you are truly free, the exhilaration of liberty is unmistakeable, just like the thrill of true love, which when it happens – turns your whole body and mind captive, and moves with great, heaving, seismic shifts, the mountains within.
I remember reading somewhere that unlike sadness or melancholia, happiness is a very difficult emotion to write about: it is more complex and capricious; less emotive. I feel that this is true, both because the experience of real happiness can be both banal and difficult to describe, but also because when we are really happy in life, just as when we are really busy, it is difficult to find the time to write.
All writing is an anachronism. It draws our glance from the future into the past – as Proust’s great work so beautifully illustrates and monumentalises. The action of this retreating wave, casts all sorts of debris onto the sand banks of the mind; but it is an action which is essentially a little sad and regressive, as all nostalgic acts or those of re-memberances are.
If writing is concave, the structure of happiness is the opposite: happiness looks towards the future or exists in the moment alone, like the projecting face of a jewel or a ray of light. To write then, is to betray the fundamental precondition of happiness. One cannot help but conclude, then, that it is a dangerous thing to love to write as writing will inevitable drag you back towards the infinacy of the ocean, where real human happiness exists on the shore alone.
833 words a day 