Born under a bad sign
I been down since I began to crawl
If it wasn’t for bad luck
I wouldn’t have no luck at all
           —William Bell

Who said you should be happy? Do your work.
           —Colette

 

I keep imagining a bright light going off like a bomb inside his head. Why, exactly, I can’t say, since that isn’t really how he describes the feeling. I must confuse him with the Apostle Paul, struck down on the road to Damascus by a heavenly corona (there’s that famous Caravaggio where he’s prostrate and clutching at his eyes). But I’m speaking of the hermit Richard Rolle of Hampole and of his first mystical experience, which he explains thus: “Suddenly I felt within me a merry and unknown heat . . .  I was expert that it was not from a creature but from my Maker, because I found it grew hotter and more glad.” Rolle, a fourteenth-century ascetic, is considered by a number of theologians to be the father of English mysticism. What’s his bearing here? He also happens to be the person credited with introducing the word happy into the lexicon, in 1340, in the book-length poem The Pricke of Conscience, written for the “unlered and lewed,” namely, the lowbrow folks who understood only their Northumbrian brand of English.

Interesting guy, Rolle. He was spotted as gifted early on, and was sent off to Oxford. Despite showing a lot of promise there, he quit and returned home to North Yorkshire. He borrowed from his sister two gowns—one gray, one white—along with his father’s old rainhood, and struck out for the forest. From those garments he fashioned the dress of a hermit, and lived hand to mouth for the remainder of his life, which amounted to four decades. He died in 1349, mostly likely of the Black Plague. Keats might’ve liked him, as Rolle took a lot of pleasure from the nightingale, a bird whose song he wrote about quite a bit.

The reason all this is germane is that the one time Rolle uses the word happy in this poem of 9,624 lines, it has to do with prosperity, something he doesn’t look too favorably upon. The “continuel happy commyng / Of worldly gudes,” he tells us, “es a takenyng / Of þe dampnacion þat sal be.” Echoes here of Christ’s counsel that it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. In other words, on judgment day, if you enjoyed in life the “continual happy coming of worldly goods,” you’re going to be standing there “with-outen pite,” as Rolle later tells us, from your Maker.

This initial use of happy mostly meant “fortunate.” It’s the first small step away from the Old Norse happ, which meant “good luck” and had ties to the Old Church Slavic kobi, or “fate.” Rolle was disappointed that the world “flese ay þe state of povert.” Like St. Francis of Assisi, he thought an embrace of the poor life was essential.

Of course, it often takes a while to push the language forward—people are always dying of the Black Plague when they might have been innovating instead—and it was a couple of hundred years before happynesse popped up in written form, in a book about French grammar, by John Palsgrave, a priest in the court of Henry VIII. Here, though, it still meant “prosperity” or “success.” It wasn’t until 1591, in Spenser’s poem “The Ruines of Time,” that we came to something like our present-day notion of happiness, which tends to be a pleasurable contentment of mind related to having attained something we consider good. Spenser writes of a “beast [that] hath no hope of happinesse or blis.” That hitching of “happiness” to “bliss” was an important one. Now the idea started to take root much quicker, and you’ll find mention of happiness in Shakespeare and Milton on down. Not two hundred years after Spenser, the idea of personal happiness had become so prevalent that Thomas Jefferson considered its pursuit a self-evident, inalienable right, equal in importance to life and liberty.

In retrospect, the granting of this right may have been more burden than liberation. Today, as Sven Birkerts suggests in his essay in this volume, our tries at determining how to live “have all to do with happiness, the wanting, getting, keeping, it’s enough to drive a person crazy.” The reason it drives us crazy may be that, according to Dan Gilbert, in his book Stumbling on Happiness, we’re just not very good at predicting how we’re going to feel. And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, this is how we make most of our decisions. Gilbert doesn’t mean we don’t know at all whether something’s going to make us happy. But we’re often way off in degree. We completely misjudge exactly how happy something will make us, or for how long. Still we go right along trusting our intuition about happiness and making decisions accordingly.

It was suggested to us here at Ecotone last fall, by a couple of readers, that perhaps after three consecutive somewhat dark issues (one focused on brutality; the next had a cover with a perished albatross chick; and the third contemplated sex and death), we ought to ponder something cheerier. So that’s what we’ve done. The concept of happiness, though, can be a brittle one if approached head-on in every instance. So while some of items in this issue are straightforward in their treatment of happiness, you’ll find a number of others that approach the idea more glancingly. The John Porcellino comic “Outsider,” for instance, might not qualify as uplifting. Music and parties and revelry were supposed to make us happy. Why didn’t they?

We’ve also included a grouping of new translations from Denmark, which, according to both Bloomsburg Business Week and Forbes, was the happiest country on earth in 2010. Fully 82 percent of its citizens consider themselves to be “thriving.” What sort of art does the happiest place on earth produce? Maybe not the sort you’d expect. There are other treats, too, including a group of poems by elementary school students that remind us of ways of seeing which we too often forget.

Experience eventually jades many of us. It’s interesting to consider exactly how much our notions of happiness will always be tied up with that embedded word hap—happenstance, a mishap, good luck, chance, fate. Some years ago there was an intriguing film called Thirteen Conversations About One Thing. (Need I say what the one thing was?) The film contains a slew of proverbs that feel like they’ve been around for ages, yet, perhaps impossibly, are original to the screenplay so far as I have been able to deduce. The most piercing statements the characters make have to do with luck and reversals. “Fortune smiles on some, and laughs at others,” says one. Another, watching a man celebrate with his friends in a corner of the bar, mutters, “Show me a happy man, and I’ll show you a disaster waiting to happen.” It’s a prediction that proves to be true not long after. This tension, this dread of collapse, is secretly present in almost every moment of happiness, and may be why we pursue the elusive feeling so doggedly. We’re ever aware of its transience.

Richard Rolle was, too. I’d be remiss not to mention that while the OED credits him with authorship of The Pricke of Conscience, some people don’t think he wrote it. According to the scholar Hope Emily Allen, “It was one of those medieval works that became almost common property—a kind of compilation, fair prey to any scribe.” Rolle himself admits that it was “drawn from divers works.” Like Chaucer, like Shakespeare, he raided existing texts. He’d been briefly to the Sorbonne, where he may have come across a thirteenth-century French treatise called Le Somme des Vices et de Vertues. Whatever the case, Rolle was a man absorbed by his work. His life was given over to asceticism and contemplation. He was a prolific and often lyric writer, and was an influence on the three great English mystics of the fourteenth century who followed him. Irrespective of The Pricke of Conscience, he did use the word happy in his book The Fire of Love, which recounts his mystical experiences with the Godhead, feelings that he refers to variously as a “most happy flame” and “the invisible melody.”

In the last nine years of his life, Rolle lived near the Cistercian nunnery of Hampole, and made friends there. When the Black Plague came to England in 1349, he helped the sick. Most biographers think he contracted the disease this way, and died from it. What were his thoughts as he tended to the dying, as he touched their wounds, as he wiped their brows? I like to think he felt this most happy flame and heard the invisible melody within him.