But what about happiness on its own terms, apart from contrast? More than anything else, I think of a scene from the very novel whose opening sentence seems to deny happiness a specificity that the novel conveys so beautifully. Midway through “Anna Karenina,” after Levin has had his marriage proposal accepted by the woman he loves, he wanders the streets of Moscow at dawn. He is sleepless and exulted, “perfectly lifted out of the conditions of material life.” But what makes the passage such a sublime evocation of happiness — to my mind — is precisely the way it delivers “material life” in such crystalline terms: “And what he saw then, he never saw again after. The children especially going to school, the bluish doves flying down from the roofs to the pavement, and the little loaves covered with flour, thrust out by an unseen hand, touched him. . . . The dove, with a whir of her wings, darted away, flashing in the sun, amid grains of snow that quivered in the air. . . . “ Continue reading the main story This isn’t happiness as homogenizing force — turning all families alike, all love into a Hallmark card — this is happiness offering singularity: a vision that won’t ever be repeated. This happiness is granular: flakes of snow, flour-dusted bread. It’s made of ordinary things turned luminescent. We aren’t looking at this happiness — it would be like staring at the sun — we’re standing inside it and looking at everything else. The vision is haunted by a sense of impermanence, turned vivid by it: We feel the possibility of another videotape someday running. What Levin sees now, he has seen before, a thousand times — but he’ll never see any of it again. It glows with the certainty of that loss.
Posted on: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 15:53:40 +0000
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