What the Devil Cannot Touch

It seems as though happiness should make a difference only in one’s mind, but that’s not true: increasingly researchers are finding that it makes big differences in the outer world as well. Successful people are not happy because they’re successful. They’re successful because they’re happy.

I’ve been having an unhappy summer, which is unusual, because normally my summers are blissful. Lovely weather, living in England, plenty of time to see people, the freedom to set my own schedule and work on my own projects, going everywhere by bike (more exercise, no time cooped up in a car), and hence the freedom to eat Indian food every time the impulse strikes while still losing weight...what’s not to like?

But I think this summer qualifies for the ‘crap holiday’ column in the paper. The first problem is that I’m spending the summer in England, but my nanny couldn’t start till two weeks in. So I flew over and had jet lag and promptly fell ill. Then I was scheduled to put in an appearance at a conference, so I had to trek up to a friend’s house. I came off the train and she said ebulliently, ‘Hi! How are you?’ I said, ‘I have to go to bed.' So she shoehorned me into bed, where I stayed till the next day, when she drove me to the conference, I propped myself up and gave my paper, she drove me back, and I crawled back into bed. I stayed there (despite lovely dinners and sparkling conversation going on in the house below me) until it was time for the train the next day, and then I dragged myself back down to Cambridge, and then struggled to manage illness and a five-year-old for another ten days till the nanny came back from her choir tour. Memo to self: never do this again.

From then on it’s been a series of calamities. I have to confess that there have been some lovely parts of the summer too. I’ve read a passel of fascinating books, among them John Carey’s elegantly researched What Good Are the Arts? and Cressida Connolly’s The Rare and the Beautiful: The Art, Loves, and Lives of the Garman Sisters. I had some lovely days with friends. I collected juicy gossip. I ate enough Indian food to keep me until next year. I discovered that Café Naz delivers to your door. I saw ‘Safety Last!’ on the big screen with orchestra, and ‘Spamalot!’ on the big stage, ditto. I found Jean Duvernoy’s Registre d’inquisition de Jacques Fournier, eveque de Pamiers (1318-1325) just sitting on the open shelves of the university library, waiting for me to take it and photocopy the very amusing heresies of Raimond Delaire and then take them to the Tea-Room and read through them while running into everyone I know. And books like this require a desperately long wait from interlibrary loan back home. And the Tea-Room and indeed the library itself, as C. F. Forbes said about being well-dressed, induce a sense of tranquility that religion is powerless to bestow.

But against that put the fact that I’ve been fighting off illness for the rest of the summer. I went over to a friend's house the other day and was so ill that I fell asleep on her sofa and slept the rest of the afternoon! How to win friends and influence people! Because of all this I’ve been unproductive and had to cancel innumerable fun excursions. Then I injured my right hand and couldn’t use it for a while. What's more, the bedroom I’m in has no electricity. Who knew bedtime reading was a necessity for my well-being? I did. The weather has been chilly and rainy. And terrible news from home: two friends have been diagnosed with cancer in the last month.

Add various other calamities, some of them not minor, and the Personal Bliss Index was pretty gloomy. And so it begins to spiral downward. I’m ill, so I don’t see as many people. I don’t see people, so I feel gloomy. I feel gloomy, so I get less done. I’m unproductive, so I feel anxious. And all of this makes me want to escape into a good trashy novel, and there’s no damn light in the bedroom. I start wanting to crawl in a hole and pull the hole in after me. Then when something difficult comes up, I’m not feeling at all ebullient enough to deal with it successfully. And success comes from happiness, not the other way around.

But I spent a wonderful day yesterday with a friend at the reconstructed Anglo-Saxon village, and I figured out how to turn the hot water on, and Café Naz delivered. Sometimes, as Blake said, there is a moment in every day that the devil cannot touch.