What is the secret of those rare
moments of ineffable happiness, when all the world is in tune?
After many years in New York and
Europe, I was back in the plains-states visiting my cousin Riley on the farm he
had never left. We walked through the fields and sat on a log. Alert, amused, Riley
whittled on a stick as I told stories of London, Paris, Madrid.
The leaves of the cotton woods
rustled in the summer breeze. A redbird called, its notes so clear they seemed
to split the air. I forgot my story as I listened to the leaves and the bird
and felt the same inexplicable happiness I had felt a lifetime ago on this same
farm.
I was 15 then, Riley 20. Riley had
wanted to get the ploughing done and was working all night. I had just learned to drive the
tractor and was eager to help. We took turns ploughing and sleeping in the
haystack. The hired girl would bring us coffee and sandwiches at midnight.
When I awoke at 11:30 the
three-quarter moon had risen. The tractor droned powerfully, its light eating
into the furrows. At the end of a row Riley would jump down and hold a book in
the light for half a minute. He was memorizing a poem, something by Walt
Whitman about "... rich, apple-blossom’d earth! Smile for
your lover comes!" He was a great
reader; the librarian used to say he checked out more books than anyone else in
the county.
As I was watching the scene, some
strange sort of light seemed to turn on for me. I saw the moon, the tractor, the
field, the trees, the house, the haystack, as if from all sides at once. It was
so beautiful, so magical, I feared to breathe lest I change something. Time seemed
to stop, and I wanted it never to start again.
And now, sitting on a log many years
later, I felt the same ineffable happiness. I heard the bird, the leaves. I was
in the scene, part of it.
I tried to explain to Riley but knew
I couldn’t. I recalled the tractor, the moonlight. I was there, I said. The moon was there. Oh, it
was hopeless trying to put it into words. But Riley nodded, and suddenly I
realized something. Riley knew all about that magic. He had experienced it
often.
“You know the secret!" I cried.
"What is it?"
Riley smiled and put aside his
whittling.
"No-one can explain it,"
he said. "Oh, I’ve found hints in many of the books I’ve read. But first I
felt it, just as you did. And so did the
men who tried to write about it. They felt it independently, separated by
oceans and centuries; yet they all shared the same experience."
"But what is it?"
"If I had to put it in one
sentence," Riley went on, "I would say, ‘Full consciousness brings
joy.’ One of the mysteries is that the Universe contains innate joy. Once you
fully open your senses to anything—a sunset, a waterfall, a stone, a blade of
grass—the joy comes.
“But to open the senses, to become
really conscious, you have to drop out of the future and the past and remain
for a while on what T.S. Eliot, in his poem, ‘Burnt Norton’, called ‘the still
point of the turning world,’ the present. The only true reality is the present.
The past is gone; the future is not yet.
“That long-ago night was beautiful
to you because of the unusual circumstances. Waking up at midnight in a
haystack turned you upside down. You stopped planning into the future and
thinking into the past. You were there in the Now.
“Children have these moments
frequently. But they grow up and lose the capacity. Yet, with the dim memory of
ecstasy and the hope for more, they pursue this hope for the rest of their lives,
forever grasping and forever analyzing. They’re on a journey which has no destination,
except death. For this reason, most men do actually live ‘lives of quiet
desperation’.
"Schopenhauer said that most
men are ‘lumbermen’. They walk through a beautiful forest always thinking:
‘What can this tree do for me? How many board-feet of lumber will it produce?
Last year I netted such and so; this year I must do better’. They are always in
the past or future; they are always becoming, they never are.
“Then through the forest comes the
artist, though maybe he never painted a picture. He stops before a tree, and
because he asks nothing of the tree he really sees it. He is not planning the
future; for the moment he has no concern for himself. The self drops out. Time
stops. He is there, in the present. He sees the tree with full consciousness.
It is beautiful. Joy steps in, unasked.
“It is not important how you explain
this; it is the feeling, the experience that counts. Some people believe
everything in the Universe—a field of wheat swaying in the wind, a mountain, a
cloud, the first snowfall of winter—has a being, an intelligence and soul of its
own. When we can think of things in this way it is
easier to love them, and love is the prime ingredient of these experiences. But
our love must not be possessive. William Blake put it perfectly when he said,
‘He who binds to himself a joy, does the winged life destroy; but he who kisses
the joy as it flies, lives in eternity’s sunrise.’
"Martin Buber says we can learn
to love the world— things, animals, people, stars—as Thou. And that when we do love them and address
them as Thou, they always respond. This is probably the greatest thrill of
all—the response of joy to joy.
"I believe most men can have
their glimpses of the eternal, their timeless moments, and almost any time they
choose. Many of our little practical tasks—say we are hoeing the garden,
picking fruit or trimming a hedge—require only 1/100 part of our consciousness.
We use the other 99 parts daydreaming of tomorrow or remembering
yesterday. If we can only watch the movement of our hands, the trembling of a
leaf, feel the sun on our skin, the breeze in our hair and eliminate quickly
the constant intrusion of thoughts of past and future, if we can successfully
do this for even tens of seconds, the joy will come.
"The eyes will shine with a new
light, and if a stranger passes during one of these moments and you exchange a
glance, the chances are," said Riley, "that he, too, will share in
the mystery."
Driving back to town alone, I
stopped the car and walked down a winding lane. Pulling a leaf from a bush, I
tried to "see" it. But I found immediately that I was planning
tomorrow’s appointment. I studied the leaf, stared at it—and was remembering some
trivial thing from the past.
Suddenly, out of the clear sky came
a clap of thunder: a plane breaking the sound barrier. In the silence that followed
I heard, to the exclusion of all other perceptions, the musical call of
a meadow lark. There was strength in
the loud, brief song and a flutelike delicacy, peaceful, plaintive; and, over all,
there was a joyous acceptance of the eternal now, astride the centuries and millenniums.
Originally published in Reader's Digest, February, 1965
