At the Royal Academy of Music’s European Summer School for young musicians, 1973, in Caen, Normandy, we played Brahms 2. It is a very sunny work. Herr Dr Brahms, with perhaps rather leaden Teutonic humour, warned his friends that the symphony he was working on was very dark and morose. I think we must have been playing it in a dark and morose fashion, because during the rehearsal the conductor said to us, “Cheer up! Have you never been happy?” And I wondered about that. The soundtrack of my life has not been Brahms 2, rather Honegger 2. Not that Honegger 2 is entirely dark and morose. In its second movement, when it could hardly get any gloomier, there comes a miraculous, God-given vision of utter peace and serenity. And (eternal optimist as I hope to be), the last movement and its close are extremely up-beat.
I’ve just finished reading the 20th Anniversary Edition of The Art of Happiness, a Handbook for Living, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and Howard C. Cutler (Hodder & Stoughton 1998). “Dedicated to the Reader. May you find happiness.” Well, how could I resist? Dr Howard C. Cutler is a psychiatrist based in Phoenix Arizona, and the book is largely a record of conversations between the psychiatrist and the spiritual leader of the Tibetan people. The central thesis of the book is that the meaning of life is to be found in the conscientious pursuit of happiness. Right enough, isn’t that built into the American Constitution?
The distinguished actor Albert Finney once received a lifetime achievement award, and in his acceptance speech, he quoted a line he once had to render in a play, which at the time he thought was little more than a throwaway remark, but which he had come to realise was profoundly true: Life is all about having a good time. That reminded me of a line concerning the meaning of life the Scottish actor Ian Charleson had in a movie – I paraphrase – “I don’t know why we are here, but it’s certainly not to have a good time.” I suppose that is a profoundly Scottish sentiment.
The last time I read anything about the Dalai Lama, it was in a short piece by Emily Maitlis in her collection Airhead. She interviewed His Holiness in a posh London hotel and was rather bemused, because, if I interpreted her correctly, his responses to questions of profound spiritual significance seemed somewhat simplistic. She went along to interview, literally, a god, only to find that he was a perfectly regular guy, warm hearted and full of smiles. I got the impression, not so much that she thought he was an impostor, rather that the mythology that had grown up around him was fake. I had a vague reminiscence of Peter Sellers’ last film, Being There, in which he played a gardener who is regarded as a great sage when in fact he is what used to be called a “natural”, or, after the fashion of Forrest Gump, an idiot.
Heretofore, it has never crossed my mind to pursue happiness. I have always thought of happiness as something nebulous, something hard to grasp. It has occasionally ambushed me and taken me by surprise, but I have never taken seriously the idea of bottling happiness. I have this idea that if you actively try to pursue it and capture it, it will merely elude you. On the other hand, if you lay yourself open to the possibility of happiness choosing you, then, just maybe, for a moment, you will get lucky. What is the inscription at the head of the score of Elgar 2? Rarely, rarely comest thou, spirit of delight.
Oddly enough, The Art of Happiness reminded me somewhat of Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, a book not so much instructing you how to be happy, as how to survive, how to choose to survive, even in the direst circumstances. But when it comes to self-help books, my Bible is the classic lampoon of the life-style guides common in 1930s America, James Thurber’s Let Your Mind Alone! I have no intention of undergoing psychoanalysis. I have a notion that, for me at least, that level of self-scrutiny might be a path to madness. On these occasions when I have been surprised by joy, I’ve always found myself embarked on some project that has taken me out of myself – making music with others, trying to master a foreign language, medicine certainly; even writing a book is an escape from self-absorption and introspection because it is intended ultimately to be a communication with other people.
I recall the psychiatrists in Edinburgh were fond of a stock question about mood, or “affect”, “How are you within yourself?” Usually, of course, “How are you?” is merely a conventional greeting, and not the sincere, delving enquiry that is a therapist’s overture to an essay at diagnosis. So I just reply “Good, thanks”, with an antipodean twang. I find enquiries about my personal happiness slightly discomfiting, and I usually give a stock reply. “Call no man happy!” “How’s life? Roller coaster ride, roller coaster ride!” I’m not proud of it. In the doctor’s surgery I have sometimes heard people say, with regret, “If I had the opportunity to live my life again, knowing what I know now, I would live it entirely differently.” They are reminiscing about a woodland walk among bluebells, in life’s springtime, encountering Robert Frost’s bifurcation of ways, one much like the other. What difference then? For myself, I have this odd, inexplicable notion that I took the other path. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the late Milan Kundera remarked that you can never know which of two options is the better course, because you can only live out one of them. So I tend not to dwell on life’s alternative universes. No regrets then.
One regret. I wish I had realised that I didn’t have to take on the whole world on my own.
jamescalumcampbell 