Risking Delight

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies

are not starving someplace, they are starving

somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.

But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.

Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not

be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not

be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women

at the fountain are laughing together between

the suffering they have known and the awfulness

in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody

in the village is very sick. There is laughter

every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,

and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.

If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,

we lessen the importance of their deprivation.

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,

but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have

the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless

furnace of this world. To make injustice the only

measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.

If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,

we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.

We must admit there will be music despite everything.

We stand at the prow again of a small ship

anchored late at night in the tiny port

looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront

is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.

To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat

comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth

all the years of sorrow that are to come.

                                                —Jack Gilbert

This Fourth of July, my bike lock fell off my handlebars sometime on a three-mile trip to the grocery store. This is one of those things that instantly reminds me of the feebleness of my body without wheels, and reawakens my dread of losing the ability to travel freely and without the worry that my vehicle will be stolen. I checked every foot of trail between my apartment and the grocery store, under a bright gray headache-inducing sky and steady cold rain. I did not find it, and decided to look for a bike lock at gas stations, the only other places open on this holiday.

The first, nearer one did not have a bike lock, nor did another convenience store. I had been in the rain for almost two hours at this point and was losing courage fast.

But like in an old story, an inner voice told me—Just ride to the top of yon hill, lad. Then ye may return home. This inner voice was apparently from northern England.

And upon reaching the top of the hill, I saw the sharp lights of a gas station, like Jane Eyre seeing the parson’s house across the moor.

I arrived at the convenience store and found an attendant leaning against the outside wall, smoking a cigarette.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” she replied, clearly peeved at being distracted on her smoke break.

“Do you sell gas—er, bike locks here?” The speaking part of my brain was short of oxygen.

“No,” she said, looking back at her phone.

“Okay.” I mounted my bike and turned back to ride through some more oily puddles.

In a moment my story had changed from one of classical Providence to something like Sergey Dovlatov’s tragi-farcical sketches of late Soviet life.

At least I had already bought ibuprofen.

This morning, I had been planning to go to Acadia National Park. However, I woke up to howling winds and driving rain. I knew it would rain, but not this hard. I had already begun composing an essay in my head about my trip. It would parallel Ishmael’s arrival in port during a storm in the opening chapters of Moby Dick. It would celebrate the sights of huge waves driven by (comfortably distant) hurricane winds, and perhaps speculate about unseen whales in the Atlantic, the horrors of modern whaling, and our changing relationship with Leviathan in the days of climate change.

But I won’t be able to write that essay yet, because I was not willing to go to Acadia on a day forecasted to have two inches of rain. Apologies, Ishmael.

Instead, I went into town, bike-less, in the pouring post-hurricane rain, ordered French toast and corned beef hash at a diner, and listened to an audio recording of Patrick O’Brian’s H.M.S. Surprise. All the time hearing, for some reason, David Bowie’s “Suffragette City” in my head. And I had a grand time doing it, especially since I knew I was denying Fate the satisfaction of making me miserable.

It made me think of something I had thought of many times before—what matters is not external events but one’s response to them—which is often a matter of rallying against them. To me, this is a source of happiness: the knowledge that we are making an effort to live well in the world. What draws me to Moby Dick is ultimately not its setting but Ishmael’s narrative voice, delighting in absurdity even in strange and terrible conditions. It's the same reason I admire Lizzy's voice in Pride and Prejudice, delighting in other absurdities, though in surroundings usually reckoned much more pleasant than the 'tween decks of the Pequod.

Compared to the suffering of many people, the kind of problems I have would be relief. And yet I don’t advocate being thankful for the kind of problems we have—an impossible if possibly noble task. Nor yet do I advocate feeling guilty for one’s gifts, an unproductive and merely Puritanical task. I suppose we have to risk delight, wherever we are, as Jack Gilbert encourages us.

Reading in the afternoon of a day that was no longer titled “The Day I Didn’t Go to Acadia” but instead a free day whose meaning I was still uncovering, I arrived at this passage in Moby Dick: describing the Pequod for the first time, Ishmael tells us, “Long seasoned and weather-stained in the typhoons and calms of all four oceans, her old hull’s complexion was darkened like a French grenadier’s, who has alike fought in Egypt and Siberia.” The wide-traveling experience suggested here instantly delighted me. It led me to consider the degrees of separation between me and the (imaginary) French grenadier. First there were the original, and probably none too enjoyable, experiences of shooting musket-balls at the British in Egypt and the Russians in Siberia. (By the way, Napoleon's army was turned back near Moscow. Poetic license.) Then there was the distance of time, which allowed the grenadier to pick out the meaningful parts of those experiences and craft them into a story which he wore proudly on his weathered cheeks. Then Herman Melville either saw such a person—or, more likely, read about one. One day at the docks, in an imaginative moment, he connected this person with a ship he admired. Finally, he wrote this thought down, and over a century later, I read it.

And yet all those sequential frames are instantly fused into a single windowpane by the magic of human communication—in this case, by the written word and the power of story. Is telling and listening to stories, however small, our most accessible way of risking happiness?