The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  The obstacles are formidable. Each sex clings to its ancient prerogatives even when it protests against them. Sex is still associated with conquest and domination, and there is little sign of its demilitarisation. Three-quarters of the men in the world, according to a ‘survey of thirty-five cultures’, are hungry for one-night stands. Marriages based on love rather than on duty still leave women as caretakers of men, with love providing an alibi for continuing their traditional domestic chores – ‘I wouldn’t wash his socks if I didn’t love him.’ A century ago, having a husband who brought a wage home was considered more important than his insults, violence and infidelity, and there was nothing shameful about Saturday night fights between spouses; but today women who have won financial independence are still not always immune from more subtle forms of contempt. Is there really no remedy for these stubborn grievances?

  The efforts of public authorities are very far from having succeeded. Could ordinary couples do better in private and personal experiments? Only they can clarify what they want from sex and love; only they can develop more satisfying forms of communication. It is true that Yun failed in her attempt to open up her hermetically sealed couple and that Fu failed to act as heroically and independently as he believed males were supposed to. Two centuries later, however, they might possibly have seen a way out of their dilemma. In the U.S., at any rate, a recent survey has found that what men and women disapprove of above all else is being lied to, almost twice as much as they did forty years ago, when the concealment of sexual infidelity was widely accepted: now, however, 91 per cent regard cheating on one’s partner as much more heinous than all the taboos of the past, like divorce, pre-marital sex and babies out of wedlock, which used to be punished with private humiliation and public censure. Openness between lovers was one of the first remedies that intelligent women imagined for dealing with boring marriages back in the early nineteenth century, but men were not ready. Attention was therefore switched to winning the same rights for women as men enjoyed. But for women to become more like men is not an improvement. There are still innumerable men unwilling or unable to reveal their emotions or to understand the complexities of intimacy. Couples who hardly ever talk abound. One of the rare investigations of what couples say to each other found that half remain silent while making love, and the other half ‘say loving words’. Experts advise lovers to say ‘romantic things’ and some give a list of suitable sentences, of remarkable banality, as though a sexual performance is comparable to a religious liturgy, at which everyone should be repeating the equivalent of the same favourite prayer. The experts remain baffled by the bizarre thoughts and seemingly uncharacteristic sexual fantasies that often emerge during intercourse, and the rare serious scientific studies of them limit themselves to connecting these with pathological categories like anxiety, rather than investigating them as interesting openings of the imagination and invitations to conversation about ideas that each partner is often incapable of understanding or is even unaware of harbouring. There has been so much concentration on the physical and emotional delights of intercourse, and the drug-like high it produces, that there is still much more to be discovered about what it can do to stimulate mutual appreciation, affection and animation.

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  There is no longer any need to regard sexual desire as comparable to hunger for food. One reason why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex is that cooking does not simply aim to feed individual appetites but also fosters conviviality, making eating into a feast dedicated to entertaining, charming and surprising guests of many kinds, and expanding knowledge about the variety of foods and tastes the world over. By contrast, sex has become private and secret. Once upon a time it was at the heart of a universal conviviality, with whole communities publicly and festively worshipping the fertility of everything that lived, celebrating copulation in public in the same way that they honoured sowing seeds in the fields; the growth of the crops and the birth of children were all one. But now that having as many children as possible has ceased to be the main purpose of sex, and that the ambition to be ‘fruitful and multiply’ has been replaced by the search for pleasure and love, and for equal opportunities for that half of humanity whose role was for long limited to procreation, it is clear that old myths about masculinity and femininity need to be sent to the cleaners. This is no simple matter, because stereotypes about sex are so deeply entrenched and seduction is such an absorbing game that relationships may long continue to be theatrical performances, relentlessly repeated. The fourth-century Chinese woman who hoped that the rules of sex would be quite different if they were drawn up by women rather than men would find today that not only has that not happened, but it is not obvious what the result would be.

  The new factor is that private life need no longer be perceived as somehow inferior to public life, as more trivial and selfish; it need not be a mere refuge from public life, the secretive custodian of truths hidden by worldly hypocrisies. It is on the contrary where the relationships on which public life depends are forged, and where an infinity of gradations of attachments are nourished, a busy workshop brewing sympathy and curiosity, knitting emotional and intellectual bonds, and sometimes also breaking them. So it has a crucial part to play in furthering equality, which remains a mirage despite all the efforts of politics and economics. Ineradicable disparities in appearance, character or talent between individuals can only be metamorphosed into valued advantages through private affection. No law, no treasure, no pill can equalise the fears that torment each person and that ultimately determine how much of a life a person has; equality of opportunity is an empty promise if achievement depends on victory over so many fears, and the haunting presence of one’s own inadequacies. The unequal distribution of anxiety is intensified by the unequal distribution of affection, which is what private life creates. People are so starved of affection, not only of receiving affection but also of opportunities to give it, that they offer it to celebrities they have never met, and do not complain that they get none back in return. Private life, when it is a nursery of affection, is an indispensable catalyst for equality.

  In private also it becomes possible to deepen the meaning of fraternity beyond what governments and philanthropists do, who are concerned with reducing the distress of disadvantaged minorities. But everyone is in need of fraternity, to give and receive it, to convey what one possesses across the barriers that self-regard imposes, to acquire qualities one does not possess, to incorporate sensations one has not experienced, to enter into the thoughts of others, to be more aware of possibilities one has not dared envisage. It is above all through private conversations that people obtain the reassurance and courage to attempt what they may have never thought possible before, find partners enabling them to do something they could not have done alone, and become animated with the feeling that by discovering others and being discovered by others, and by assimilating what each gives the other, they have become more fully alive. Appreciation, affection and animation are what private life can add to public life. Political revolutions have neglected them. It remains for sexual revolutions to expand the idea of the couple, to see the problems that lovers encounter as part of the more universal issue of one-to-one relationships that affects every branch of existence.

  The story of Fu and Yun is an unfinished one. The fruits of being a couple are still being discovered.

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  What can artists aim for beyond self-expression?

  IN MEDIAEVAL JAPAN, in one of the most rigid of hierarchical societies, a hereditary ruling class of tough Samurai warriors discovered that when they wrote poetry they could become unrecognisably gentle, and their attitude to strangers was transformed. ‘Even when we are meeting for the first time . . . we feel an intimacy with one another . . . and are just as close as cousins.’ This quotation is from the poet Sogi (1421–1502), the master of ‘linked-verse’, poetry written by two or more people, composing alternate verses. He has a place in humanity’s common memory because he was un
rivalled in creating sensitive links between different collaborators: his charm united the most unlikely strangers in a common search for beauty.

  Poetry conceived of as intimate conversation goes back even to before the ninth century, when the Dialogue between a Poor Man and a Destitute Man was composed, but Sogi went further. Travelling around the country, carrying only his writing kit, lodging in a grass-thatched hut, he held poetry parties that revealed how, in a country plagued by violent political conflict, art could create bonds between strangers. His amateur fellow poets felt such pleasure in their collaboration that, he said, ‘We have also thought that we might perhaps be together in the next world.’ They ‘do not feel uncomfortable socialising with their juniors, and those of noble birth do not shun their social inferiors’. Anybody could attend these meetings with complete anonymity, guaranteeing equality: they concealed their identity under loose-fitting clothes and wide-brimmed rice-straw hats that obscured their faces. Often sitting in the shade of a cherry tree, ‘under the flowers’, empathy for the natural world added another dimension to their feeling of community: Sogi’s favourite flower, the pale yellow wild rose, inspired the belief that ‘the essence of linked verse [renga] is to give a mind to that which lacks a mind and to give speech to that which cannot speak’.

  His poetry was in some ways the predecessor of sport in that it encouraged social classes to mix, temporarily equal in their club shirts, but it did so at a deeper level, because it involved the careful expression of aesthetic emotions, and the ability to respond elegantly to those of one’s partners.

  The Japanese ‘philosophy of the artistic way’, gei-do-ron, was the art of socialising with strangers. However, this kind of poetry had to be composed according to fixed rules, so it initially remained impersonal, the emphasis being on creating a coherent whole out of disparate elements, rather than recognising or encouraging originality in each individual. It was only a first step in the search for inspiration from strangers, by getting them to participate in an activity that blurred their singularities.

  The second step was to make being a stranger a virtue that anyone could practise and refine. Again, art was used as a catalyst, inciting different professions and classes temporarily to set aside the barriers that separated them, ignoring status. In the practice of art, people could learn to live two separate lives, one official, determined by their birth, occupation and wealth, and the other personal, shaped by artistic activity. Officially everybody had fixed and lifelong obligations, with good manners meaning respect for superiors, but privately, by joining artistic circles, they could find freedom in their social exchanges. Artists invented the ‘floating world’ as an alternative reality, where moral rules could be broken, where sensual pleasures could be cultivated both light-heartedly and with sophistication, and where the joys of sharing could be intense.

  Art also became an alternative to political protest. In seventeenth-century Japan, young men from the fringes of the aristocracy – masterless or low-ranking Samurai with no hope of battle honours in peacetime – became ‘skinheads’. With their foreheads and temples shaved, their hair hanging long at the back, rather than tied in a topknot, they smoked tobacco while they loitered in public places, dancing and singing in the streets, proud of their trendy clothes, with velvet collars, short kimonos and wide belts. Some flaunted their homosexuality, discarding traditional loyalties. They came to be known as kabuki, ‘crooked’ or eccentric people.

  Then independent women made the protest even more radical. They were led by Izomo no Okuni, whose importance as the country’s first female entertainment star was finally acknowledged in 2003 when a statue of her was erected in Kyoto. A froth of legend surrounds her biography, as it does that of her contemporary Shakespeare, but ancient sources speak of her as though she was almost divine. She ‘had a face which was unique in the world, clever hands, a heart that allowed her feelings to express themselves in song, and her gentleness had profound colours.

  Holding a flower, she could suggest the whisper of a lover in the moonlight . . . She was a true poetess.’ Another wrote: ‘She deserves to be called The First Woman of the Universe. But I cannot become the first man of the universe: not to be the equal of this woman mortifies me and I feel destroyed.’ Originally, she worked as an attendant at a Buddhist shrine, but travelled widely as a performer to raise money for its repair, inspired by priests who believed that the doctrines of Buddha could be more easily appreciated ‘not by boring and difficult sermons but by plunging into ecstasy through song and dance’. Okuni won instant success and national fame, and invented kabuki theatre.

  This was originally a ribald, satirical, sexually suggestive song-and-dance show, interspersed with comic sketches. The all-female cast, wearing elegant male clothes, mimicked and mocked the ‘crooked’ men. The government closed their theatre down as immoral, but beautiful boys replaced them. So actors became the trend-setters of fashion, with clothes and hairstyles that fascinated men and women alike. A huge fashion industry blossomed. Personal appearance became an obsession, and those who could not afford silk could pride themselves on the latest trends in striped cotton. Stylishness became the escape route from vulgarity. Art expanded sensibilities and refined eroticism. Ordinary people were able to accept their inferior place in the ‘real’ world, the hard-headed world, by diverting their protest into the floating world and aesthetic rebellion. They expressed their private emotions in ‘women’s hand’ (Japanese script) to distinguish themselves from the official class which used Chinese in public documents, as Europeans used Latin. This was an early challenge to the idea that men and women are irrevocably strangers.

  However, though artists have been important intermediaries not only between individuals, but also between civilisations that see themselves as strangers, exercising an influence more subtle and more long-lasting than diplomats, there have so far been limits to what they could achieve. Being sensuous and generous in the floating world, in the evening or when not at work, did not necessarily make patrons of the arts any less ruthless in the daily struggle for power and profit. On the contrary, it had disastrous consequences for work, by giving plausibility to the belief that the most delightful pleasures should be sought after hours, and that work was for more serious and practical purposes. In the past, when left to themselves, humans thought otherwise. Early visitors to America were astonished to find the indigenous population apparently spending most of their time doing nothing from morning to night, and a few said they could ‘live with less labour and more pleasure and plenty as Indians’ than they could in their home country. Even in England before the Industrial Revolution, despite the poverty and seasonal unemployment and the absence of all those comforts now judged to be essential, work was more casual and sociable than it later became, with frequent pauses for rest, talking and drinking, more free days balancing the longer hours; work was integrated into the rest of life rather than segregated from it. The Japanese may have been made more skilful at switching between a plurality of identities by their art, accepting ambiguity and fragility in their aesthetic mode, while insisting on hierarchy and obedience in their business mode, and that may have helped them to accept some strange Western innovations while simultaneously retaining their traditions. However, art has not sufficed.

  Today, though Japan’s achievements in many fields have been brilliant, 80 per cent of its present inhabitants say that they expect to die of overwork – suggesting that they are becoming estranged from their jobs, just as they are becoming estranged from the idea of being happy to die for their country. When cartoons show the lavatory as the only place once-revered fathers can find to read their newspaper in peace, when women’s magazines declare that women no longer envy men, when two-thirds of women want a daughter rather than a son, when, despite the vast increase in every kind of entertainment to make the floating world exciting, more and more say in opinion polls that their life is meaningless and that ‘they are becoming stupider than their computers’, in other words they ar
e strangers in their own country, strangers to one another. Art has not protected them, any more than their faith in their social cohesion and ineradicable traditions, their world leadership in technologies or their businesses that became almost surrogate families.

  The rich all over the world display revolutionary paintings on the walls of their mansions, in the same way that sinners built churches or temples to purge their crimes, but as patrons of the arts and religion they have not necessarily altered the methods that enabled them to acquire their power. This has meant that ‘culture’ could flourish in one small corner, sometimes brilliantly, while brutal force and boring work could continue to dominate the rest of existence. The separation of art from work is one of the tragedies of history.

  The place where one meets most strangers is at work. What makes seemingly prosaic jobs appealing is that they bring one into contact with people who open windows into worlds one does not know. Work has been completely redesigned twice in the past, by the agricultural and industrial revolutions. To redesign it once again to suit contemporary aspirations would involve transcending the separation between commerce and spirituality, between power and friendship, between the floating world and the hard-headed world. The hard-headed world is no more the real world than the floating world of the imagination. Both exist, though they are strangers. Do supermarkets, offices and factories, where art is no more than decoration liable to be eliminated when costs are cut, have to be the way they are forever? Can the different occupations and professions which absorb so much of human energy, and which require constant negotiation with strangers, evolve more relationships that are not just mercenary, but widen understanding? Is it possible to be more ambitious than just seeking ‘work–life balance’, which holds out the hope of a better life by exalting activities outside work, and in doing so distracts attention from the mind-numbing effects that many jobs still impose on all but the very privileged? In later chapters, I shall describe my own efforts to discover, through practical trials, how else work can be organised to suit people who want to be more curious, adventurous, intelligent, sensitive or artistic, without relying on leisure pursuits to compensate for its frequent futility and boredom.