One of my favourite authors is John McGahern. In his Memoir, McGahern writes (p80):
I take the belief that the best of life is life lived quietly, where change is imperceptible, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.
You could hardly imagine a viewpoint more at odds with the ethos of our time. We live in a world (especially the virtual world) where people crave change, celebrate the new and try to cram as many experiences into each day as possible.
What McGahern is pointing out though, I think, is that happiness comes with the depth of the experience not the breadth of experiences and their newness.
In McGahern’s masterpiece, “That they may face the rising sun”, one of the main characters, Jamesie, has never left the part of Ireland he was born in, except to visit his son in Dublin on one occasion. McGahern emphasises Jamesie’s view that despite his lack of travel he ‘knows’ the whole world and his enthusiasm for that world: ‘it is spring again and everything is interesting’. McGahern seems to me to be arguing that just how ‘interesting’ depends on you and, paradoxically in this modern era, the depth of your familiarity with things and not their ‘newness’.
Of course, for most of us there is some balance needed here. None of us want to live out our lives in a single village, But we should never mistake the titillation of newness with genuine happiness.
