Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [9]
Pursuing happiness, and I did, and I still do, is not at all the same as being happy – which I think is fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.
If the sun is shining, stand in it – yes, yes, yes. Happy times are great, but happy times pass – they have to – because time passes.
The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred.
What you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life. There’s the hap – the fate, the draw that is yours, and it isn’t fixed, but changing the course of the stream, or dealing new cards, whatever metaphor you want to use – that’s going to take a lot of energy. There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.
The pursuit isn’t all or nothing – it’s all AND nothing. Like all Quest Stories.
When I was born I became the visible corner of a folded map.
The map has more than one route. More than one destination. The map that is the unfolding self is not exactly leading anywhere. The arrow that says YOU ARE HERE is your first coordinate. There is a lot that you can’t change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey …
3
In The Beginning Was The Word
My mother had taught me to read from the Book of Deuteronomy because it is full of animals (mostly unclean). Whenever we read ‘Thou shall not eat any beast that does not chew the cud or part the hoof’ she drew all the creatures mentioned. Horses, bunnies and little ducks were vague fabulous things, but I knew all about pelicans, rock badgers, sloths and bats … My mother drew winged insects, and the birds of the air, but my favourite ones were the seabed ones, the molluscs. I had a fine collection from the beach at Blackpool. She had a blue pen for the waves and brown ink for the scaly-backed crab. Lobsters were red biro … Deuteronomy had its drawbacks; it is full of Abominations and Unmentionables. Whenever we read about a bastard, or someone with crushed testicles, my mother turned over the page and said, ‘Leave that to the Lord,’ but when she’d gone, I’d sneak a look. I was glad I didn’t have testicles. They sounded like intestines, only on the outside, and the men in the Bible were always having them cut off and not being able to go to church. Horrid.
from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
MY MOTHER WAS in charge of language. My father had never really learned to read – he could manage slowly, with his finger on the line, but he had left school at twelve and gone to work at the Liverpool docks. Before he was twelve, no one had bothered to read to him. His own father had been a drunk who often took his small son to the pub with him, left him outside, staggered out hours later and walked home, and forgot my dad, asleep in a doorway.
Dad loved Mrs Winterson reading out loud – and I did too. She always stood up while we two sat down, and it was intimate and impressive all at the same time.
She read the Bible every night for half an hour, starting at the beginning, and making her way through all sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. When she got to her favourite bit, the Book of Revelation, and the Apocalypse, and everyone being exploded and the Devil in the bottomless pit, she gave us all a week off to think about things. Then she started again, Genesis Chapter One. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth …
It seemed to me to be a lot of work to make a whole planet, a whole universe, and blow it up, but that is one of the problems with the literal-minded versions of Christianity; why look after the planet when you know it is all going to end in pieces?
My mother was a good reader, confident and dramatic. She read the Bible as though it had just been written – and perhaps it was like that for her. I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.
Working-class families