Happiness for us is thinkable
only in the air that we have breathed,
among the people who have lived with us.
In other words, there vibrates
in the idea of happiness
…the idea of salvation.

…Our life it can be said,
is a muscle strong enough
to contract the whole of historical time.

Or, to put it differently,
the genuine conception of historical time
rests entirely upon the image of redemption.

The Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin p. 479

Happiness is not a momentary event. It has a long tail that reaches back into the past. Happiness feeds off of all that has been part of a life. It does not have a shiny appearance; its appearance is an afterglow. We owe our happiness to the salvation of the past. This salvation requires narrative tension in which the present integrates the past, thereby making the past a continuing influence, even resurrecting the past.

In the state of happiness, salvation reverberates.

When everything becomes part of a maelstrom of actuality, a story of contingency, there can be no happiness for us.

The crisis of narration, by Byung-chul Han, from chapt. The Narrated Life p. 16

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The quote from Benjamin notes a happiness that you can grasp, that which matters most, entails every effect of our past, — there’s family by blood or by circumstance, teachers, friends, and some not friends. All that has happened to us with and because of them – what if every past experience that “made us” could be recognized as ‘well and good’? 

That is the ‘long tail’ as Han describes it.

In a long backward look, can I affirm more of my past, the slights, disappointments, perhaps even intentional torments as necessary, a matter of my destiny, the fortune of my life? If so, then one is becoming happy. Does a memory once too painful for recall, at this juncture present as a positive aspect of the ‘me’ that I have become?

Han writes, defining this as salvation, the integration of the past with the present, a narrative which illuminates, resurrects a ragged past. This is an afterglow of reconciliation of past and present.

By and through the work of face to face encounter, wrestling with words, excavating words to bring into the light of another’s regard the truth of my past, – that I am most likely to experience happiness. In turn your words invite me to mindfully listen, hearing the nuance of your story. Life lived as story, robust, strong enough to weave a history, to withstand my fear of death…

But what about the last line from the Han quotation? The idea-of-salvation, happiness, the integration of lived/historical time is juxtaposed with our contemporary experience of social media information explosion, the acceleration of time, everything in play, perishable information, etc.. Vertigo becomes overwhelming, and we pretend as best as we can, to be happy.

It is fitting to conclude with these lines from T. S. Eliot’s Little Gidding.

And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.