Like the great emperors, sensitive scholars, monks, and witty wanderers of the thirteenth century gathered under Japan’s cherry branches to compose poetry, each contributing a line or two to the creation of a communal poem. Feasting ensued, as it will, and social standing mattered less than a shared sense of poignancy.
In 1598, Emperor Hideyoshi (1536–1598), the swaggering Cecil B. DeMille of cherry blossom parties, threw a famous bash, his last hurrah, inviting several hundred courtiers to Daigo-ji temple, in Kyoto. Hideyoshi, who loved a theatrical touch, oversaw every aspect of the massive preparations. He ordered the restoration of a tenth-century pagoda at the site. Nearby, gardeners installed an immense, handsome boulder hauled in from one of the imperial palaces. Another pavilion, hitched to the shore by quaint bridges, was constructed in the middle of the great pond. The workers fabricated waterfalls, built teahouses and a stage. Most impressively, Hideyoshi had more than seven hundred cherry trees transplanted from across Japan.
When the great day finally arrived, the courtiers all gathered, the ladies wearing daringly draped robes and boyishly cut hairdos. Hideyoshi dressed magnificently, wearing false whiskers and false eyebrows, and with his teeth blackened, as was the fashion. And then came the main event, as he led his guests through an impossibly lush tunnel of full-blooming cherry trees, their fallen blossoms carpeting the pathway with delicate petals. “The entire temple was filled with great pleasure,” a spectator reported. “Everyone was satisfied.”
Yet the fourteenth-century monk Yoshida Kenko (born ca.1283) had noted that blossom viewing need not be thought of as a once-a-year party, but could be instead a year-round state of mind. “Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless?” he wondered. “People commonly regret that the cherry blossoms scatter or that the moon sinks in the sky, and this is natural; but only an exceptionally insensitive man would say, ‘This branch and that branch have lost their blossoms. There is nothing worth seeing now.’ ”
When Walden was published in 1854, critics puzzled over Henry David Thoreau’s account of his experimental years living in the Massachusetts woods, where he called a self-built shack home. Most agreed that Thoreau (1817–1862) had a witty, pretty way of describing nature, and many could see the value in his seeking a less complicated life. But the fact that he emerged from his self-imposed seclusion every day or two—strolling the mile or so into Concord for a bit of fun or going to his mother’s house for lunch—seemed like cheating. As his mother divulged, “Henry was by no means so utterly indifferent to the good things of life as he liked to believe himself.” One of his critics put it less kindly: “He played savage on the borders of civilization.”
And yet, though some might have thought he exaggerated his independence, it’s true that out in the woods Thoreau lived quite simply. “It appeared more beautiful to live low,” he wrote. He proudly went without underwear, gloves, or an overcoat. Once, when camping in the mountains without a blanket, he covered up at night with a wooden board held by the weight of a big rock. With his expenses kept in check by his keen thrift, Thoreau was freer than most. At Walden Pond he might spend the afternoon reading while lolling in the shade next to a brook. “What he did there,” a critic wrote, “besides writing the book before us, cultivating beans, sounding Walden Pond, reading Homer, baking johnny-cakes, studying Brahminical theology, listening to chipping-squirrels, receiving visits, and having high imaginations, we do not know.” For Thoreau it was enough.
In the woods he found the solitude he dearly craved. “You think I am impoverishing myself by withdrawing from men,” he wrote to a friend, “but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted to a higher society.” He said he’d rather sit “on a pumpkin” alone than suffer sitting with others “crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Yet, when Joseph Hosmer, son of a farmer friend, turned up one Sunday in 1845, Thoreau graciously played the host, serving a bang-up meal that demonstrated his self-reliance. “His hospitality and manner of entertainment were unique, and peculiar to the time and place,” Hosmer later recalled. In a stone-lined fire pit, Thoreau made flatbread with lake water, baking the loaves on a stone. Then he roasted some horned pout en papillote. His beans, which he raised by the acre, were his pride and joy. “What shall I learn of beans or beans of me?” he wrote. “I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day’s work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean.” During the season, he began hoeing at around five in the morning, and quit at noon to pursue “other affairs.”
When he died, Thoreau had published only two books, and Walden had attained only moderate success. His American peers viewed his work with critical distance. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) called Walden “capital reading, but very wicked and heathenish.” “The practical moral of it,” he wrote, “seems to be that if a man is willing to sink himself into a woodchuck he can live as cheaply as that quadruped, but after all, for me, I prefer walking on two legs.” Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) sniffed that Thoreau’s Walden experiment “carried out a schoolboy whim to its full proportions.”
But Thoreau’s ideas about independence, liberty, and living the good life survived to influence later thinkers, including Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. He refused to be satisfied by the status quo, preferring—most of the time—to “live on the stretch.” As Thoreau explained, “I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
Late in China’s Ming era (1368–1644), a time of extreme extravagance, the Yangtze region of Jiangnan, around the city of Shouzu, was the nexus of the pleasure-seeking set, where the locals were “habituated to excess and splendour, and to a delight in the rare and strange,” one denizen reported. They paraded by in the richest clothes, and dined like kings.
For many, the height of sensual fulfillment lay in eating fresh river crabs on an autumn afternoon. Zhang Dai (1597–ca.1684), a writer and bon vivant from the region, spent his later days destitute and lonely, remembering the good times, when he “painstakingly researched the daily pleasures of the mouth and stomach.” The most pleasant of those pleasurable days were autumn afternoons when Zhang and his friends convened their Crab-Eating Club down on the riverbanks. The freshwater crabs were plump—“as big as a serving dish,” he recalled—and their claws were perfectly purple. Each club member was allotted six crabs, cooked riverside and eaten one at a time, so the delicate dish wouldn’t lose its flavor. The friends dug into bamboo shoots and newly harvested rice, chasing it all down with wine and snow orchid tea. “When I think of it today,” Zhang wrote, “it is really as though we had tasted the offerings of the immortals come from the celestial kitchens, reaching the point of total satiation and intoxication.”
Playwright Li Yu (1610–1680), another local artist with an oversize appetite, lived his days in an aesthetic haze, going so far as to sleep with a vase of flowers tucked inside his bed curtain. “Once, just as I was about to waken from a sweet dream, I smelled the scent of the winter-sweet and my throat and mouth were filled with a clear, delicate fragrance that seemed to emanate from somewhere inside of me,” he recalled. “My body felt light and as if about to ascend, and I concluded I was no longer part of this mortal world.”
Li Yu rhapsodized about flowers and Suzhou strawberries, and once penned a poem titled “Eating Fresh Lichees in Fujian.” But, as everyone around him knew, nothing transported him to that otherworldly realm like a lunch of fresh crab. “My family tease me for considering crabs as important as life itself,” he wrote. His tastes, like Zhang Dai’s, often exceeded his budget, though he saved each year in anticipation of crab season. “From the day the cr
abs appear until the end of the season, I never let an evening or, indeed, a couple of hours go by without indulging in them.” Fresh, plump crab, “smooth white like jade” and “rich yellow like gold,” should be eaten simply steamed in the shell and served on a bed of ice, he declared. “It has already attained a perfection of color, fragrance, and flavor that nothing else can surpass,” Li wrote. “Blending it with other flavors is as hopeless an enterprise as lighting a torch to increase the sun’s heat or scooping water to increase the river’s depth.”
The afternoon nap is a pleasure known from Papua New Guinea to Patagonia. The Bible mentions Ishbosheth, who fell into bed at noon. Ancient Romans rested during the hora sexta, the sixth hour after dawn. Centuries later, Benedictine monks followed suit, settling down in summertime for a midday snooze. After a full meal, as nineteenth-century health experts argued, the period of repose aids digestion. “Muscular exertion draws the blood to the muscles, and brain work draws it to the head; and in consequence of this the stomach loses the supply which is necessary to it when performing its office,” a popular American magazine noted. “The heaviness which is felt after a full meal is a sure indication of the need of quiet.”
Some of history’s big achievers advocated for the midday nap. Thomas Edison (1847–1931), who often worked through the night, could drop off almost anywhere, napping in the park under a tree or right on top of his workbench. Winston Churchill (1874–1965) was a true believer, insisting, “You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no half-way measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed.”
Yet, slowly, as business leaders in industrialized countries focused evermore on productivity, the nap went into demise. Once, people had been paid by the job, working and napping at their own pace. But when workers began to earn their pay by the hour, there could be no napping on company time—that is, except in Latin American holdout countries, and in warm-weathered, big-hearted Mediterranean countries like Spain, the stalwart napping zones.
Similarly, China traditionally held a strict reverence for the nap, or xiu xi. Ancient Taoists were staunch nap takers—a trend that caught on among the literati during the Song era (960–1279). Throughout Mao’s rule, the xiu xi was upheld by Article 49 of the People’s Republic’s 1950 constitution, which proclaimed: “The working people have the right to rest.” Rest was necessary in order to maintain top production speeds, Chinese experts argued. Meanwhile, American critics rolled their eyes, with a New York Times reporter in 1973 calling the Chinese xiu xi a “habit that is as unshakable as in Spain and at least as costly in terms of man-hours lost to the economy.… A bed is preferred, but any flat surface will do.”
Finally, during the 1980s, Chinese officials fell prey to international anti-napping sentiments, convinced that indulging in xiu xi put them at a disadvantage. The government made an official change to the national work schedule, cutting the workers’ three-hour lunch break to a mere one hour. That left Spain the single industrialized country that officially condoned the nap. That is, until 2006, when government workers’ official lunchtime siesta was reduced from three hours to a fleeting sixty minutes.
As a girl, Frances Burney d’Arblay (1752–1840), aka Fanny Burney, later one of the premier British novelists of her age, was suspicious of her own love of reading. “I make a kind of rule never to indulge myself in my two most favourite pursuits, reading & writing, in the morning,” she confided to her diary at age fourteen. “No, like a very good Girl I give that up wholly.” She focused on her needlework instead, “which means,” she wrote, “my Reading & writing in the afternoon is a pleasure I am not blamed for & does me no harm, as it does not take up the Time I ought to spend otherwise.” Reading was a reward for good deeds done. But even so, reading alone made her a little nervous. “Anything highly beautiful I have almost an aversion to reading alone,” d’Arblay insisted.
Reading silently—without speaking the words aloud—was a new skill. Monks and aristocrats had learned to read to themselves by the fifteenth century, but for everyone else, the undertaking was still decadent and strange. And if the novel offered an especially guilty pleasure in the eighteenth century, it was because more than any other kind of literature it fanned the seductive powers of the imagination. “It is to be feared, the moral view is rarely regarded by youthful and inexperienced readers, who naturally pay the chief attention to the lively descriptions of love, and its effects; and who, while they read, eagerly wish to be actors in the scenes which they admire,” cautioned the English Reverend Vicesimus Knox (1752–1821) in 1787. Unlike biographies, or tame books of letters, novels of the sort one read alone inflamed ardor, an effect that the pious insisted few readers could resist.
Young women were especially at risk, due to the assumed depths of their empathy. They read “to the neglect of industry, health, proper exercise, and to the ruin both of body and of soul,” snapped the author of The Evils of Adultery and Prostitution (1792). “The increase of novels will help to account for the increase of prostitution and for the numerous adulteries and elopements that we hear of in the different parts of the kingdom.” Medical writers chimed in too, advising young women to avoid fiction entirely, as it could affect the nervous system, leading them to the verge of hysteria, or worse. “A novel read in secret is a dangerous thing,” one etiquette writer warned.
Still pondering the topic a century later, in 1896 the British advice writer Lady Laura Ridding wondered, “What Should Women Read?”—in her article of the same title. Whatever it was, it shouldn’t be “morbid, pessimistic, coarse, flippant, irreverent … bigoted controversial books.” Instead, proper reading should educate. And yet, “the strawberry ices of literature glow on every railway bookstall in the shape of the lighter magazines, the society and comic papers, fashion journals, sensational stories,” Ridding sighed. There was simply no denying the deliciousness of an afternoon spent on the sofa, as another writer put it, with “a shilling shocker and a shilling’s worth of sweeties.”
On the whole, however, Victorian England didn’t pay much attention to that sort of prim critique. Perhaps everyone was too busy reading novels to care. “We have become a novel-reading people,” wrote Anthony Trollope (1815–1882) in 1870, having supplied readers with some of the era’s best-loved books. “Novels are in the hands of us all, from the Prime Minister down to the last-appointed scullery-maid.”
Arriving at New York’s JFK airport in the spring of 1974, German artist Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) was quickly wrapped in felt, strapped onto a gurney, and loaded into an ambulance. The staged abduction was the beginning of his provocative performance piece Coyote, or I Like America and America Likes Me. Handlers shuttled the artist down to SoHo and into a stark art gallery, where he spent the next three days locked inside with a wild coyote. Theirs was a strange dance of “long, calm, concentrated, almost silent days of dialogue between representatives of two species,” wrote an observer, following the action from behind an installed length of chain-link fence.
During a seventy-five-minute sequence repeated over those three days, Beuys, dressed like an eccentric shepherd, watched the animal’s every move, responding with choreographed movements of his own. He liked to think of the piece as a concert. “When I first came in,” an art critic wrote, “I saw the coyote and two piles of felt. One of them turned out to be Beuys, wrapped, and with a wooden cane sticking out of the top.” Sometimes Beuys got up, threw off his cape, and struck three notes on a triangle hanging by a string from his waistband. (The sound cued a gallery attendant in the next room to play a recording of a roaring turbine.) Beuys threw his pair of work gloves to the coyote to play with. He sat on the coyote’s pile of straw, which had traveled with the animal from upstate New York, and smoked a cigarette. And on it went, as Beuys’s performance was set in motion by the coyote a dozen times during the days they were together. “When he came near to my figuration, I bowed in devotion,” said Beuys. “When he lay down, I knelt. And when he fell asleep, I fell over. Then when he sprang
up again, I threw off the felt and jumped up too. That was how the cycle went.”
Sometimes the coyote snapped at Beuys’s crook-handled staff, or shredded pieces of his felt, and sometimes the animal made a nest in it, curling up for a nap. Felt was a potent symbol for the artist, who, as a bomber pilot in 1940, had been shot down in the Crimean mountains, then saved by Tatars who wrapped him in layers of fat and felt to keep him from freezing to death. For Beuys, the Coyote performance offered another kind of healing. It was a ritual meant to mend the centuries-old rift between America and the Native Americans, who revered the coyote as an archetypal trickster. “You could say that a reckoning has to be made with the coyote,” Beuys explained, “and only then can this trauma be lifted.”
At the end of their time together, Beuys tenderly hugged the coyote goodbye. Then he rewrapped himself in his felt, climbed back onto the gurney, and rode in the ambulance to the airport to fly home. He was pleased with the outcome of his performance and also with his new coyote friend. “I really made good contact with him,” he said. At the time of Beuys’s death some twelve years later, when his enigmatic, ritualistic approach to performance art was still confounding art world pundits, The New York Times would wonder whether Beuys was “shaman or charlatan, sage or pest, saint or silly.”
Maybe Beuys was a trickster, but the unforgettable images of his iconoclastic Coyote solidified his reputation as a powerful force on the international performance art scene. “The spirit of the coyote is so mighty that the human being cannot understand what it is,” he said, “or what it can do for human kind in the future.”
In the 1890s, Marcel Proust (1871–1922) was a dandyish young society reporter observing and absorbing the glittering Paris scene that swirled around Count Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921), one of the century’s most dedicated aesthetes. For fun, de Montesquiou and his frivolous friends, including Sarah Bernhardt, liked to dress up, lacing themselves into eighteenth-century costumes styled after those of Marie Antoinette and her crew. At his parties, the beau monde walked over flower petals. Rare blooms and birds filled his Japanese-inspired hothouse. His pet turtle’s shell was encrusted with jewels. Not too surprisingly, Proust, the bright young man-about-town, became his protégé.
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