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“Happiness is an illusory, elusive thing, it looks like a forest moth that merges with tree bark, you never know if it is here or has already flown away …” Every month we offer you an excerpt from a book that you yourself would like to read.
“The Oasians worked in silence…Peter couldn’t tell if they were happy. His most fervent intention was to get to know them well enough to know if they were happy.
Happiness is an illusory, elusive thing, it looks like a forest moth that merges with a tree bark, you never know if it is here or has already flown away … One young woman, a newly-made Christian, once said to him: “You should have seen me a year ago, when my friends and I were playing, we neighed like horses, laughed endlessly, people turned after us to see what was so funny, and dreamed that they would have such a great time, and all this time I constantly thought: “Lord Help, I am so terribly lonely, so terribly sad, I want to die, I am not able to endure this life for a minute more, do you understand what this means?
In the new novel by Michel Faber, the British pastor Peter is sent as a missionary to the planet Oasis, with the inhabitants of which earthlings are establishing contact.
“The book of strange new things”, 18+ (Azbuka, 2015).
And then there was Ian Dewar, ranting about his time in the army, complaining about the miners and thieves who stole the necessities of the soldiers. “Buy yourself binoculars, my friend, one armor for two, and if your leg is cut off, then take these two pills, because we don’t have morphine for you.” And one day, after fifteen minutes of these complaints, remembering that other people were patiently waiting for their turn to talk to him, Peter interrupted these outpourings: “Forgive me, Ian, but you don’t need to go over your grievances all the time. God was there. He was with you. He saw everything that happened there. He saw everything.” And Ian broke down, and burst into tears, and said that he knew it, knew it, and therefore, despite all this, despite all the complaints and anger, deep down in his soul he was happy – really happy.
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- What do we need to eat to be happy?
And then there was Beatrice, the day he proposed to her, the day everything went wrong. He proposed to her at ten-thirty, on a suffocatingly hot morning, as they stood at the ATM machine on the high street, about to go shopping at the supermarket. He should probably get down on one knee, because her “yeah, come on” sounded uncertain and somehow unromantic, as if she considered his proposal nothing more than a pragmatic solution to save on rent. And then the ATM swallowed her card, and she had to go to the bank to get her out, meet with the manager, and he thrashed her for half an hour, poor, as if she was an imposter who stole the card and pretended to be some other, real Beatrice. Then they went to the store, but they could barely afford half of what was on their shopping list … And so it went on all day: Bea’s phone battery died, the banana they tried to eat for lunch turned out to be rotten inside, Bea the strap on her shoe broke and she had to fall on one leg. To top it off, it took them so long to get to Bea’s apartment that the expensive lamb chops they had bought were out of the heat. For Peter, this was the last straw. He grabbed a Styrofoam tray of chops and was about to toss it in the trash, throwing it with all his might to punish the meat for such shameless vulnerability. But the meat was not bought with his money, and he managed – barely – to restrain himself. He put the food in the fridge, splashed water in his face and went to look for Bea.
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- Happiness: A Short Course in Programming
She stood on the balcony, staring at the brick wall that surrounded the apartment building where she lived. Her cheeks were wet.
“Forgive me,” he said.
She found his hand, and their fingers intertwined.
“I cry with happiness,” she explained.
And the sun finally allowed the clouds to cover itself, the air freshened, a gentle breeze stroked their hair.
“This is the happiest day of my life.”
Michel Faber is a Dutch writer based in Scotland, author of six novels and several collections of short stories, and literary columnist for The Guardian.