Emily, whose words speak to me still

One of the benefits of retiring is that I have, over the last few weeks, renewed my acquaintance with a fascinating woman.

Actually, I think it’s more than a mere acquaintance. I like to think of it much more as a friendship.

It’s a one-sided friendship, I grant you that. Well, it could hardly be any other way. Because Emily, as I like to think of her though she’d be more properly referred to as Emilie, does not include among her stellar qualities – brilliance, drive, generosity – the rather practical one of being alive. In fact, she died well over 250 years ago.

Emily at work

As it happens, even if we had been contemporaries, I doubt my friendship would have been reciprocated. As a member of the French aristocracy, and an outstanding intellectual, she would have been unaware of my existence.

Emily may be one of my friends, but I would not have been one of hers.

None of that stopped me working on a novel based on her life. It takes the form of a confession, from her death bed, in which she reflects on all she has done or failed to do, the things that might have gone better, the things that could have been or actually were disasters. I was fascinated by the subject and got the whole thing written bar perhaps twenty pages some three or four years ago.

Other things then got in the way. Work was one, but that has finished. A different novel also held me up: this is the one where I make space available for Misty, our cat, along with Luci, our first toy poodle, and Toffee, the second and the most turbulent of the three, to express their views. These I have stolen from their diaries, and I’m proud of all three for their achievement: after all, most peoples’ pets can barely hold a pen let alone keep a diary.

The first book of their diary extracts (wittily entitled Through a cat’s eyes and dogs’ tales) is now complete and is only looking for a publisher (I say ‘only’ but that’s a far bigger undertaking, it seems to me, than writing the dratted thing in the first place). 

All three animals with Danielle
One of the illustrations by my daughter-in-law Senada

So now I’ve been able to get back to Emily. 

One of the pleasurable aspects of the book is that I’ve used her voice wherever possible. We have a lot of her correspondence, so I know what she actually said about certain events and people (not necessarily what she thought about them: as the politics of today’s world show, what people say isn’t always what they think).

She also wrote a lot, though she didn’t always publish it. For instance, she kept her Discourse on Happiness strictly to herself in her life, though we’ve published it since.

The best way of making sure of happiness, she argued, was to make it depend entirely on yourself. Study, she says, is the best way to achieve that aim. And yet:

…the passion which can give us our greatest pleasure and make us happiest, leaves our happiness entirely dependent on others: you understand that I am talking about love. This passion is perhaps the only one that can make us desire life, and make us grateful to the creator of nature, whoever he might be, for giving us our existence.

Emily had such a passion. The one great love of her life, among many other lesser ones, was for the most celebrated wit and polemicist of their time, Voltaire. But:

I don’t know however whether love has ever brought together two people made for each other to such a point that they would never feel the surfeit of pleasure, or the cooling to which ease and security lead, nor the indolence and half-heartedness which arise from familiarity and the long continuance of a relationship

That was the fate of her bond with Voltaire. Towards the end of her life, they were both indulging in affairs with others. Indeed, she fell pregnant at 42, a dangerous age at that time, as a result of an infatuation for a much younger and entirely inappropriate man. She died as result of an infection associated with childbirth.

Hence the death bed with which my novel starts. But it’s striking that gathered around it, as well as the young man who’d fathered the newborn daughter, there were her husband, always a loyal and supportive friend to her, and, whatever cooling there may have been in their relations, Voltaire, grieving his coming loss.

They remained attached to the end, then. Though Emily was clear that it was she who ensured that was so. There are loves so great, she tells us, that there’s never more than one in a century. Hers was one of those. And it persisted, returned or not, and despite any side dalliances they may have had. The soul that loves, she tells us:

… has to love so much that it loves for two, and that the heat of its heart makes up for what is in fact missing from its happiness.

Across the centuries, I’m as moved as ever by those words from an exceptional friend, however remote she may be.

Happiness? Not all it's cracked up to be.

The nine-year old and I stood looking at the Alpine Ridge ahead of us. The sun was beating down and we were drenched with sweat. The mountain rising above us - still rising above us – was serene and seemed contemptuous of our puny struggles.

‘That’s got to be the top, doesn’t it? There can’t be any more, can there?’ I asked him.

The nine-year old, the son of friends, nodded. ‘Got to be. This has got to be as high as it gets.’

But it wasn’t. We breasted the ridge only to find yet another beyond it.

When we’d started out on our epic, two and a half hours earlier, it was to get to the top of the hillside above us in order to look down on into the valley beyond onto one of Europe’s most majestic sights, its greatest glacier, the Aletschgletscher. We’d decided that the best way to get there was straight over the top. 

Sadly the ‘hill’ surmounted by a ridge ahead of us had only turned out to be a shoulder of the mountain, with another ridge beyond it, and another beyond that, for hour after hour of hard graft. We did eventually make it to the top but it took over three hours.

Still, the view was worth it. That broad strip of white stretching down between the dun and grey cliffs, with stretches of scrub and grass too, gleaming in the hot light. The glacier was an incongruous reminder of winter in a sun-drenched summer landscape.

The Aletsch glacier
Rock and stone, even grass. And then the ice

Actually, it looked rather refreshing.

‘Let’s go and cool off,’ I said.

Well, even getting downhill wasn’t as easy as it seemed. But eventually we stood on the glacier and felt the cold of the ice under our overheated shoe soles. And we stepped inside, into crevices filled with blue light, running our fingers over icy water coating the walls and making them smooth. It had all been worth it.

Then of course we had to get home. We took one look at the climb and another at the path, broad, smooth and well maintained by the amenable Swiss authorities. We went for it and were back at our chalet in 45 minutes, instead of four hours.

Why am I telling this story?

I keep seeing posts, on Facebook or Twitter, about happiness. It’s inside you, some people proclaim. Or you only have to reach out for it rather than turn your back on it, as others maintain. Or indeed, and I hear people say this regularly, I don’t care what she/he does, as long as he/she’s happy.

It seems so obvious, doesn’t it? Everyone deserves happiness.

Except I’m not so sure. I mean, isn’t the value of happiness just a bit overstated?

Firstly, because it’s seldom unqualified. There’s usually some little fly in the ointment. The meal’s romantic enough, the candles are wonderful, you both look your very best, but it’s pissing down with rain outside. Forget the lakeside stroll.

Secondly, even if it’s pretty well sustained, isn’t happiness just a short step away from contentment? And isn’t that just what the sheep feel in their field, until the day they get loaded into the lorry for the slaughterhouse?

Now I know that in a sense that’s the fate of us all. But do I really want to spend the time up to the point the truck draws up in the farmyard grazing for a few decades, with no more to show for my passage through the world than a few piles of droppings?

It seems to me that this fixation with happiness ignores a whole lot of other emotions that are worth far more. Incomparably more. Elation. Achievement. Fulfilment. Satisfaction. Joy. Even pleasure.

You may say these are just aspects of happiness. I don’t agree. And the experience with the Aletschgletscher makes that point strongly, at least to me. Happy? I wasn’t happy. Why, I felt ashamed. I’d imposed a gruelling trial in a young lad who was in no state to take it – why he spent the next day in bed, exhausted, and though I didn’t, by evening I wished I had. He had nothing to reproach himself with, he was a child. But I was forty, for God’s sake. I should have known better than to take us over the mountain.

And physically too my state could hardly be called happy. My feet were killing me. I couldn’t remember the previous time I’d been that tired. And I was burned by the sun.

And yet – I felt real elation. We hadn’t walked round the mountain on the path, we’d taken it on. A frontal attack. And we’d won. And we’d had the glorious view from the top. Followed by the extraordinary sense of satisfaction that standing on, and inside, the glacier had given us.

Bought at the price of pain. Far more effort than either of us was used to. But far more satisfying than just standing in a field and grazing. A hell of a sight more interesting than mere happiness.

So why do we go on about happiness so much? Is it just because we’re so afraid of pain that we’d rather settle for second best? Rather than pay the price for something rather better?

It’s striking that, when he drafted the Declaration of Independence, what Thomas Jefferson considered an inalienable right wasn’t happiness. It was the pursuit of happiness. Maybe that’s the key: pursuing happiness is a lot more fun than achieving it.

As I discovered among those hellish ridges, all that time ago.