Page:Confessions of a wife (IA confessionsofwif00adamiala).pdf/109



November the third.

is no doubt about it that happiness is an occupation. When I see how long it is since I have added anything worth adding to the Accepted Manuscript, and when I try to define to myself what it is that gives me such a sense of being busy all the time, I find that it is scarcely more than the existence of joy. What I have lost is the leisure of loneliness; what I have gained is the avocation of love.

They teach us that only in heaven can we expect to know happiness. It is not true! I summon mine—a singing witness in the courts of life. I fling down the glove of joy, a challenge to such dismal doctrine. There are whole weeks when I live in poems, I breathe in song. There are entire days when I float in color, and seem to be set free in space, as a bird is, knowing the earth and loving it, but citizen of the skies and homing to them. I fall asleep as if I were a sunset, and I wake as if I were a sunrise, so near