I have a thing about Penguin Modern Classics. They are the perfect shape and size for my purse, and boy am I a sucker for Century Gothic. So when I came across one called Bliss by Katherine Mansfield I was drawn to it. Flip the book over and you will see a black and white photo of a terrifying unsmiling woman with a severe bob. How could I know that she would give me the framework to understand the Bliss-feeling that governed my life?
“Bliss” is about a young wife and mother named Bertha who is planning a dinner party. Opening paragraph:
Although Bertha Young was thirty she still had moments like this when she wanted to run instead of walk, to take dancing steps on and off the pavement, to bowl a hoop, to throw something up in the air and catch it again, or to stand still and laugh at -nothing- at nothing, simply. What can you do if you are thirty and, turning the corner of your own street, you are overcome, suddenly by a feeling of bliss--absolute bliss!- as though you’d suddenly swallowed a bright piece of that late afternoon sun out a little shower of sparks into every particle, into every finger and toe? . . .
Several things stick out to me— among them that Bliss is somehow inappropriate beyond a certain age, that the expression of Bliss must be and is suppressed. But I’m also struck by that “turning the corner of your own street.” It seems a requirement of Mansfield’s Bliss is the mundane— that the circumstances don’t prompt such an extreme ecstasy and its source is therefore unidentifiable.
Bertha continues:
Oh, is there no way you can express it without being "drunk and disorderly" ? How idiotic civilisation is! Why be given a body if you have to keep it shut up in a case like a rare, rare fiddle?
There is something physical about the expression of Bliss, something about those sun particles diffusing in the body, something about wanting to jump, dance!
This opening paragraph reminds me of one in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening:
There were days when [Edna] was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested.
There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why—when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation.
This pendulum between (or perhaps pairing of) being overcome with inexplicable joy and being dragged down by similarly inexplicable and all-consuming sadness is painfully familiar to me. I have trained myself to go along on the ride.
I won’t spoil Bliss for you (it’s free online, if you care) but I’ll say that it ends with a realization that would theoretically devastate Bertha. Instead, she fixes her eye outside the window and it seems that though the Bliss is slightly bruised, it’s still there underneath the surface.
If you’re close to me, or maybe even if you’re not, you know that much of my happiness, however tenuous, relies on Bliss as a guide. Many things can be Bliss-objects or Bliss-moments. The best personal example, perhaps, is an iphone note I wrote after sobbing and ditching class in the middle of the day to eat sushi two years ago:
So crucial to eat food that delights you with people you love but also occasionally or rather regularly alone so that you can truly savor in your delight without having to be interrupted by conversation however engaging or pleasant so that you can truly be enthralled and laser-focused on your senses, the taste and smell and temperature of the food and the room, the music and the sun pouring in from the window, on your body and the feeling of the food making its way inside you, the stark difference of being hungry and now full, entering light and now becoming beautifully heavy and maybe having a beer with oneself, something pale since it’s summer, maybe a Japanese one that is light and gingery and delectably cold and will numb your lips in that way you love— truly loving yourself in the moment, realizing and acknowledging that you are made of matter, that you are solid and steady in your body and mind, and you are inside the world and when the sun touches and browns your skin that it is inside you too, that you are made of the earth’s particles and its dust, and you smile at the waitress who has come to know your face (remember, I said regularly) and you smile at the chef whose hands rolled your sushi perfectly, and you walk out into the light, and you can keep living, at least as of today or right now. Nothing is insurmountable to you and that which is falls off of you like water. You can live.