There’s a little surge of gratitude as you think for what a tiny sliver of history this easy comfort has been around. This apparently modest achievement (a tub of liquid heated to X per cent of body temperature) is the outcome of epic labours: dams and reservoirs were constructed on distant rivers; people with broken fingernails laid the pipes; long dead inventors fretted at night to come up with the prototype non-drip tap; wind farm entrepreneurs, nuclear scientists, frogmen on oil rigs and mining engineers have ensured that hot water is constantly on hand.
The bath allows us to be both uncovered and cosy. Unless we inhabit a few favoured zones of the globe, the physical environment is normally dispiritingly hostile: by day we have to swaddle our skin in careful layers of wool and cotton and, at night, encase ourselves within sheets and duvets. Then, briefly, in the bath, none of that is necessary. A bath is an artificially warm afternoon in midsummer. It is a return to the easy nakedness of our primal ancestors. And it echoes too the months when we first floated in warm water, in the little sealed bath of the womb, soothed by the rumblings of our mother’s digestive tract and growing a pancreas and some toes to the rhythm of her heart. The bath hints to the body of its distant past of complete contentment, before it was propelled across the horizon of birth into the imperfect world.
But the pleasure of the bath is primarily intellectual. Baths are ideal places to think. Their ability to ease us towards productive ideas is probably greater than that of the places we formally assign to such work: the office, the seminar room, the library or the laboratory. The reason is that our bigger thoughts generally don’t come when commanded. They tend to emerge when we’re not quite looking, like shy deer reluctant to come out of the shadows of the forest for fear of the hunter. The warm water lulls the nervous habits of the mind. We’re off the hook. We’re perfectly free not to think at all and – by the perverse logic of the brain – this actually makes thinking easier. We can risk being totally wrong, we can imagine adventurous scenarios, and our fixed ideas can be set aside just long enough for novel, and potentially better, ones to get a hearing.
Religions have long been ambitious around bathing. Hindu priests taught their followers to immerse themselves in the waters of the Ganges. In the ceremony to mark conversion to Judaism, the candidate enters a deep pool. Christian baptism originally involved complete submersion. Religions sent people into water at big moments: when turning over a new leaf, starting afresh, getting another chance. As quite often happens in secular life, we are tentatively recreating for ourselves personal versions of ancient sacred rituals. It’s not actually surprising that this happens, because religions were deeply concerned with the way a physical act – such as bathing – can affect the mind. They were very interested in getting devotees into the right mental state and were keen to use any resource that could help. Over a very long time they accumulated great expertise. We may not share their ultimate framework of belief, but their insight into the way the body can be the means of influencing the psyche are still useful. We too can turn to the bath when we wish to get ourselves into a better mental state.
At a distance, we’re following in the footsteps of the great religions when we shut the bathroom door and turn on the hot tap. We’re not just looking to get clean. We’re trying to move on from the painful, offensive aspects of the day. We’re hoping the trauma will dissolve and gently loosen itself from us in the water. We’re seeking to liberate the better ambitions of our minds via a comfortable soak in the steaming waters of the bath.
16
Indulgent Pessimism
We’d not normally think that pessimism – anticipating the worst and taking the darker view of existence – could be a source of pleasure. But behind its dour reputation, it harbours elements of a kind and generous philosophy. Which makes sense when we consider the origins of this way of thinking. Pessimism was developed mainly in ancient Rome and principally by the dramatist and political adviser Seneca and, later, the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. They weren’t killjoys. Pessimism was a calculated strategy to safeguard happiness in a troubled and dangerous world. They were fascinated by the corrosive power of disappointment. Inflated expectations and hopes can rob anyone – no matter how good things objectively are – of satisfaction. We get miserable not because things are necessarily really so awful, but because they fall short of the standard we have demanded. To anticipate the worst is, curiously, a cheering attitude. Life isn’t incidentally miserable, pessimism tells us: it is fundamentally deeply difficult for everyone.
Here are a few of the small pleasures of pessimistic thoughts:
We reassure ourselves about the amount of time we have left by pegging our imagined death to the date of the average lifespan, without remembering that long before we reach that terminal point we will have passed through years of growing infirmity, terror as our friends die off, a sense that we no longer feel at home in the world, a humiliation that anyone doing anything significant is decades younger than us, embarrassing bladder problems and our own sexual repulsiveness. In other words: we must never hold back from a useful panic at how little time there is left.
When we resolve one major anxiety, we imagine that we will be satisfied and calm will descend. But all we’re really ever doing is freeing up space for an even more poisonous and aggressive worry to spring forth, as it always will. Life can only ever be a process of replacing one anxiety with another.
The greatest part of our suffering is brought about by our hopes (for health, happiness and success). Therefore, the kindest thing we can do for ourselves is to recognise that our griefs are not incidental or passing, but a fundamental aspect of existence which will only get worse – until the worst of all happens.
The only people we can think of as normal are those we don’t yet know very well.
We reserve a special place in our hearts for those who can’t see the point of us. Instead of ignoring them, we will take their scepticism deep into our hearts and spend much of our lives inventing strategies to persuade them of our worth – and we will never succeed.
The best way to be a calmer and nicer person is to give up on everyone. No one will appreciate you as you deserve; you will never fully satisfy the needs of another. The route to tolerance and patient good humour is to realise that one simply is, where it counts, irredeemably alone.
True wisdom is the recognition of just how often wisdom will simply not be an option. In theory, we’d love to meet trouble calmly, be poised in the face of opposition, react with humility to criticism and peacefully accept the fact that we will be outdistanced by people we don’t like. But the fact is we’ll squirm and get upset and panic and descend into rage. We’ll never be fully mature. We’ll always rebel against certain painful truths. And it’s wise to admit this about ourselves.
Worldly success is the consolation prize for those unhappy driven souls who have redirected their early humiliation and sense that they weren’t good enough into ‘achievements’ – which will never make up for the unconditional love they will deep down always crave in vain.
Rather than imagining that they might feel guilt, people who have hurt us, in fact, typically start to hate us – for reminding them of their own meanness.
For paranoia about ‘what other people think’, remember that very few love, only some hate – and nearly everyone just doesn’t care.
We have begun to know someone properly whenever they have started substantially to disappoint us.
Choosing a person to marry is just a matter of deciding what particular kind of suffering we would like to commit ourselves to.
The cure for infatuation is to get to know the object of one’s desire better. Soon their inevitable defects will be revealed.
The pleasure of pessimism isn’t linked to being mean or bitter. It’s grounded, in fact, on sympathy. This is an antidote to the oppressive modern demand to look only on the bright side. It allows us to bond with others around an honest admission of some truly sobering realities.
17
We learned self-pity when we were young. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon; you were 9 years old. Your parents wouldn’t let you have any ice cream if you didn’t do your maths homework. It was achingly unfair. Every other child in the world was playing football or watching television. No one else has such a mean mother. It was just awful.
We’re all – in theory – dead against self-pity. It seems deeply unattractive because it reveals egoism in its most basic form: the failure to put our own suffering into proper perspective against the larger backdrop of human history. We lament our tiny disasters and look coldly on the grand tragedies of the world. A problem with one’s fringe or a wrongly cooked steak dominates the mind while we ignore work conditions in China and the Gini coefficient of Brazil.
No one likes to own up to self-pity. And yet, if we are honest, it’s something we feel quite often. And in fact it’s often a rather sweet emotion.
The fact is, we do deserve a great deal more pity than other people are ever very likely to bestow upon us. Life is, in truth, horrendously hard in many ways – even if one does have a top-notch data plan and an elegantly designed fridge. Our talents are never fairly recognised, our best years will necessarily drift away, and we won’t find all the love we need. We deserve pity and there isn’t anyone else around to give it to us, so we have to supply a fair dose of it to ourselves. The operative cause might from a lofty perspective seem ridiculous – poor me, I’ll never drive a Ferrari; it’s so sad, I thought we were going to a Japanese restaurant and they’ve booked a pub. But these are just the convenient opportunities for immersing ourselves in a much bigger issue: the fundamental sorrows of existence, for which we do – genuinely – deserve the most tender compassion.
Imagine what things would be like if we couldn’t pity ourselves. We would be that far worse category of mental discomfort: depressed. The depressed person is someone who has lost the art of self-pity, who has become too rigorous with themselves. If you think of a parent comforting a child, they often spend hours on a very minor thing: a lost toy, nonou’s broken eye, the children’s party to which one was not invited. They are not being ridiculous; they are in effect teaching the child how to look after themselves – and giving space to the important idea that ‘small’ upsets can have very large internal consequences. Gradually we learn to mimic this parental attitude with ourselves and come to be able to feel sorry for ourselves when no one else will. It’s not necessarily entirely rational, but it’s a coping mechanism. A first protective shell which we develop in order to be able to manage some of the immense disappointments and frustrations that life throws at us. The defensive posture of self-pity is far from contemptible. It is touching and important. Many religions have given expression to this attitude by inventing deities who look with inexpressible pity upon human beings. In Catholicism, for instance, the Virgin Mary is often presented as weeping out of tenderness for the miseries of the normal human life. Such kindly beings are really projections of our own need to be pitied.
Self-pity is compassion we extend to ourselves. A more mature aspect of the self turns to the weak and lost parts of the psyche and comforts them, strokes them, tells them it understands and that they are indeed lovely but misunderstood. It allows them to be, for a while, a bit babyish – since that is actually what they are. It provides the undemanding, confirming love every baby, but far more importantly, every adult, needs to get through the anguish of existence.
18
Crushes
You are introduced to someone at a conference. They look nice and you have a brief chat about the theme of the keynote speaker. But already, partly because of the slope of their neck and a lilt in their accent, you have reached an overwhelming conclusion. Or, you sit down in the carriage and there, diagonally opposite you, is someone you cannot stop looking at for the rest of a journey across miles of darkening countryside. You know nothing concrete about them. You are going only by what their appearance suggests. You note that they have slipped a finger into a book (The Food of the Middle East), that their nails are bitten raw, that they have a thin leather strap around their left wrist and that they are squinting a touch short-sightedly at the map above the door. And that is enough to convince you. Another day, coming out of the supermarket, amidst a throng of people, you catch sight of a face for no longer than eight seconds and yet, here too, you feel the same overwhelming certainty – and, subsequently, a bittersweet sadness at their disappearance in the anonymous crowd.
Crushes happen to some people often and to almost everyone sometimes. Airports, trains, streets, conferences – the dynamics of modern life are forever throwing us into fleeting contact with strangers, from amongst whom we pick out a few examples who seem to us not merely interesting, but, more powerfully, the solution to our lives. This phenomenon – the crush – goes to the heart of the modern understanding of love. It could seem like a small incident, essentially comic and occasionally farcical. It may look like a minor planet in the constellation of love, but it is in fact the underlying secret central sun around which our notions of the Romantic revolve.
A crush represents in pure and perfect form the dynamics of Romantic philosophy: the explosive interaction of limited knowledge, outward obstacles to further discovery – and boundless hope.
The crush reveals how willing we are to allow details to suggest a whole. We allow the arch of someone’s eyebrow to suggest a personality. We take the way a person puts more weight on their right leg as they stand listening to a colleague as an indication of a witty independence of mind. Or their way of lowering their head seems proof of a complex shyness and sensitivity. From only a few cues, you anticipate years of happiness, buoyed by profound mutual sympathy. They will fully grasp that you love your mother even though you don’t get on well with her; that you are hard-working, even though you appear to be distracted; that you are hurt rather than angry. The parts of your character that confuse and puzzle others will at last find a soothing, wise, complex soulmate.
The truth is, though, that the person around whom we are building these thoughts will in reality inevitably be quite different from the way we picture them. They will indeed have many lovely qualities. But they will also have problems, failings, weaknesses and frankly annoying characteristics. They will have been scarred in some way or another by childhood, they will have pockets of deep selfishness, there will be things that really matter to us that they will find incomprehensible or offensive. If we tried to put a crush into practice and settled down with this individual (as our fantasy prompts) we’d find all this out soon enough.
In order to enjoy a crush we have to understand that that is what it is. If we think that we are in fact encountering a person who will make us happy, who will actually be the ideal person to live and grow old with, we are – inadvertently – destroying the specific satisfaction the crush brings. The pleasure depends on our recognising that we are imagining an ideal person, not really finding one.
To crush well is to realise that the lovely person we sketch in our heads is our creation: a creation that says more about us than about them. But what it says about us is important. The crush gives us access to our own ideals. We may not really be getting to know another person properly, but we are growing our insight into who we really are.
19
Keeping Your Clothes On
There’s an assumption at large that sexiness is at heart about nakedness and explicitness: and that logically, therefore, the sexiest scenarios must also be the ones involving the greatest amounts of nudity.
But the truth about excitement is likely to be rather different. At the core of sexiness is an idea: the idea of being allowed into someone’s life, when the memory of having been excluded from it is at its most vivid. Sexiness stems from the contrast between prohibition and acceptance. It is a species of relief and thanks at being given permission to touch and go anywhere.
Oddly, this gratitude is likely to be most prevalent not when one has been granted ful
l licence by someone – but when one is on the borderline, when one has only just been lent a pass, and when the memory of the taboo of sex which surrounds most people is still intense. The reminder of the danger of rejection brings the wonder at being included into sharp, ecstatic relief.
This explains why the decision to keep one’s clothes on a bit longer than strictly necessary, to deliberately keep clothes on during sex, can prove such a turn-on. To heighten excitement, we may design a scenario in which we are ‘allowed’ only to press against one another, never moving beyond guilty caresses and small thrusts – like we might have been forced to do in early adolescence or Saudi Arabia.
By staying clothed, we’re retaining the erotic power of anticipation. There’s a particular thrill in the early stages of an encounter – when you’re almost inadvertently, it might seem, extending your arm along the back of a sofa and lightly brushing your fingers against the top of their jumper, a few inches below the nape of their lovely neck; or tentatively exploring a booted leg under a restaurant table (while maintaining an engaging flow of conversation about French gardens or the future of the Eurozone); or when someone bends down to rescue a peanut from the carpet, making a calculated display just for you, their T-shirt stretching over a muscular shoulder, or a delicate collarbone framed by a little black dress.
Such games mean we can keep revisiting the incredible idea of permission: the outer garments evoke the barriers one has finally been able to cross with impunity. Playfully limiting oneself to pressing through wool and cotton brings into enticing alignment both one’s previous exclusion and the new wondrous inclusion.
The rule that we know full well is fake – (‘don’t go very far’) – makes our status as actual lovers all the more vivid and hence arousing. We are, via the game, trying to get over a trauma around exclusion.
Small Pleasures Page 4