TOAST

The toaster popped, violently regurgitating two blackened slabs of yesterdays hope, whilst carbonised dreams wafted around the room like the ghost of ambition, clinging to the furniture like a bad childhood memory. I buttered the burnt toast like a surgeon who already knows their patient is dead, and chewed with the kind of grim commitment only the clinically depressed or British can muster.

Then came an apologetical knock on the door, the ‘excuse me’ kind, gift-wrapped in guilt.

There stood two old insignificant women, like two deflated floral patterned cushions tossed over a “worn-but-not-dirty” rail.

“Good morning!” one chirped, with all the same grace as the toaster.

“We were wondering,” the other began, whilst brandishing a leaflet that had less soul than my burnt toast, “Have you ever thought about Heaven?”

“Yes” – I responded, before shutting the door. A single, universal heaven is a contradiction in terms. To standardise bliss is to sterilise it. True paradise, if such a thing can exist, must be personal, particular, even private, for one man’s heaven is another man’s hell, – and women, I’m sure a few of them will be knocking about up there.

But what, in the quantities of infinite, would ever make me happy?

What even is ‘happiness’ but a moment of relief from something worse. Spring, for instance, is not inherently joyous – it is joyous because it follows winter. The warmth would be meaningless without the memory of frostbite.

Happiness is not a state to be permanently attained, but as a contrast – an afterglow of suffering. And so the idea of a Heaven where everyone is perpetually content becomes suspect. Particularly the one on the leaflet, with everyone joyfully gardening – I hate gardening.

What is even more hard to swallow, like burnt toast, is that if the greatest invention since sliced bread was the toaster, then this now, here, is as good as it gets.

For happiness, is not just the absence of suffering, but the rhythm between lack and abundance. A spring that means something only because it is fleeting, fragile, and hard-won. I appreciate the toast, for I am no longer hungry, I appreciate the lack of hunger, because I know it will be short-lived, and tomorrow, I will have to use the toaster again.

Maybe I should just buy a new toaster.

“Is this glass half full?” he asked.

“Can something half true be said to be true?” she asked.

“No” he said.

“Well then,” she said, “the glass is no”

:: REFERENCES ::

• George Berkeley – A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge
• George Orwell – Can Socialists be Happy?