The Hidden Pleasures of Life

by Theodore Zeldin

  The ancient Greeks provide a hint as to how strange ideas can enter into heads ruled by custom. They did not just build temples and shrines to beg favours from the mysterious divine beings hidden in the sky, who symbolised for them the forces that governed the universe. They also liked to look at their problems from the perspective of different arts and different branches of knowledge, which they personified in the Nine Muses, one for each of the arts, one for astronomy (which provides a sense of how all the detail fits into a big picture), and one for history, because they were ever conscious of past experience; they consulted the Muses for advice, and in the process were led to think about larger and more general issues than their own mundane problems.

  Ever since, poets have sought out a Muse for inspiration, to stimulate new ideas in them, but it has not been only poets who have owed their achievements to the equivalent of a Muse, the messenger of a different point of view. Scientists and innovators, famous or humble, of many kinds, have needed one too. Albert Einstein could not have done what he did on his own. ‘I cannot do mathematical calculations easily,’ he wrote. ‘My particular ability lies in visualising the effects, consequences and possibilities, and the bearing on present thought, of the discoveries of others. I grasp things in a broad way easily.’ He needed his friend Marcel Grossman to introduce him to the mathematical models which enabled him to develop the synthesis that became general relativity. Calling this ‘creativity’ is misleading if the word is taken to imply an inherent gift that mirrors the creativity of divinity, the ability to create something out of nothing. Einstein rightly emphasises what he owed to others. They were his Muses. What he did was to generate a new idea in a way that has more in common with parents generating a child who is an independent and different creature. When two beings glimpse something in each other that neither was aware of before, and when that recognition ignites a spark which enables them to do together what they could not have done separately, so that they cross the frontiers of their private imaginations, they have found a new door to freedom. Everybody is potentially a Muse, and everybody needs a Muse, or rather many Muses, to enable their talents to bear fruit.

  But where can one go to find a Muse? It is not creativity, but sensitivity, that makes one recognise in someone else an idea that can combine with an idea of one’s own to generate a novel opportunity. It is interest in others, an awareness that everybody is different and potentially surprising that opens the way to encountering a Muse. A spouse or a sexual partner can be a Muse, but so can anyone else. The Greek Muses lived in the sky, but Muses can be found anywhere on earth; people of all sorts can seek inspiration from other people of all sorts, not least from those whom they are unlikely to encounter in the normal course of their existence and who are less liable to repeat what they have heard many times before. Hitherto most institutions have aimed to bring together individuals who resemble one another, or have something in common, and that has suited conventional ambitions, but boredom with déjà vu is revealing a hunger for adventure outside the frontiers of habit. It is ‘more interesting’ to meet people who might surprise one, and more satisfying to create a meeting place designed to encourage not superficial exchanges but more imaginative thinking, a better understanding of the past and a clearer vision of the future. The Muses of mythology were not teachers or law-makers but catalysts who aimed to bring excitement and sparks of meaning and beauty into everyday lives, refining the emotions through the practice of the arts, enabling people to see and to say what normally they dared not, asking not for worship but to be celebrated in festivity, banquets, song and dance. They provide an ideal that is an alternative to the romantic hero, and to the romantic rebel. Instead of encouraging obsession with an idealised passion, or confrontation with enemies whom one dreams of destroying, they incite one to explore and muse about the infinite variety of humankind.

  Of course, many people have chosen to limit their curiosity, assuming that wearing coloured spectacles makes life more bearable. Family tradition has also shaped their choice as to whether they developed open or closed minds, and became curious or blinkered, conformists or non-conformists. An ingenious statistician has calculated that the most adventurous individuals in Western history were younger sons, and later younger daughters. The first-born members of a family were apparently seventeen times less likely to accept new scientific ideas than later-born ones. During the political revolutions of Western Europe, the champions of radicalism were eighteen times more likely to be later-borns, while in the Protestant Reformation those who suffered martyrdom in the cause of the new doctrines were forty-eight times more often later-borns. The family, supposedly the guardian of normality, was in reality a furnace of rebellion, firing and extinguishing rebellion. But the family has changed. The privileges of the eldest, and of males, are no longer as stereotyped as they once were. Likewise, the different professions, which were in some ways a substitute or additional family, also limited curiosity through specialisation, but that heritage is being challenged too.

  So now there are probably more rebels – of sorts – than ever before. The ideal of constant innovation is a recipe for a mild version of permanent rebellion. But since rebellions have such a chequered history of limited success and painful side effects, rebels may now want to redefine themselves as explorers. As such, instead of being simply angry, they have more freedom to view enemies from a variety of perspectives, penetrating behind the poses they adopt and uncovering hidden cravings or vulnerabilities; they can discover whether too many people have been wrongly classified as enemies, who may turn out to be so only in parts of themselves, in only some of their attitudes; they can expand the imaginations of bullies (in public or private life) who are interested only in themselves because they have not learned to be interested in others; and they can discover when the most effective response to dictators who derive their sense of achievement from defiance and cruelty is likely to be not rebellion but removing oneself from their clutches, escaping, emigrating, leaving them to fight their own kind and destroy one another.

  A rebel and an oppressor are not thought of as being a couple, though they may be as obsessed with each other as a couple in love. To be locked in such a relationship is like living permanently in a cage. When in a group linked by mutual animosity, it becomes even harder to free oneself of hate.

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  What can the poor tell the rich?

  WHEN ALL SHE EATS IN A whole day is just three handfuls of rice boiled with a little salt, what does a poor woman want, more than anything else? ‘I am incapable of begging,’ she answered. She did not want charity, which she considered humiliating. She preferred to pretend that it was her personal choice to cook but once a day. ‘People concluded that my diet was strictly in accordance with the requirements of a spiritual life. I used to say: I am not hungry. But in truth I could not sleep the whole night because I was so hungry.’ When she could no longer afford even one meal a day, she collected discarded scraps, and even ate clay. Once, she went without food for a whole week. She said she was willing to die. ‘I had known nothing but misery all my life.’

  These are the words of Haimabati Sen, born in Bengal in 1866. At the age of nine she was married off to a man of forty-five who died within a year. Then her parents died. All alone, and shunned because Hindu custom saw widows as bearers of misfortune, she drifted from place to place, wherever she could find shelter with relatives or strangers, earning her keep doing domestic work. When she grew to be a handsome woman male predators tried to ensnare her, but she refused to be a mistress or a prostitute and escaped from several jobs that were not as innocent as they had seemed.

  To be a poor person, in most civilisations until very recently, used to mean to be one who had no family. Haimabati Sen sought help from a large number of close and distant relatives, but their compassion often proved demanding, insulting or greedy. Respectability came only when she married again at twenty-three, to a husband whose generous ideas she respected. But he immediately abandoned his j
ob to devote himself to a ‘search for God’, and she became the breadwinner. He expected to be waited upon, and once beat her, causing serious injury. When he died she had no money to pay for the funeral rites. Her five children, she complained, harassed and oppressed her; all but one were ungrateful, lacking in sympathy for her failing health and interested only in their own affairs; their spouses were even worse.

  ‘I cannot understand what I have gained by my suffering,’ she said at the end of her life. But it was very far from being a tragic life. On the contrary, she demonstrated forcefully what can be achieved without money, in three different domains. Though girls were told that no-one would marry them if they were educated, she learnt to read with the help of her brothers, and persisted in study, eventually winning a scholarship to a medical school, and becoming a hospital physician. She did all this while at the same time raising her children, getting up at four in the morning to do the household chores and serve her husband – who helped not at all. Being a doctor did not make her rich because she was paid a small fraction of what her colonial British superiors earned, but she found enormous satisfaction from helping patients. The shortage of money never bothered her. ‘I realised the human heart did not attain peace through the performance of duty in return for pay . . . It is the duty of every human being to help others.’ Though she had disdained receiving charity when she was on the brink of starvation, she now said ‘Charity is the one tender impulse in our heart, nothing can soften our souls and teach us self-sacrifice as well as charity.’ To sacrifice oneself for others was, for her, the purpose of life. She repaid society’s cruelty towards her with infinite kindness. ‘I do not see any need for fine clothes or quality shoes . . . nor excellent beds and mattresses. You fall asleep when you are sleepy, it does not matter where you lie down.’ The desire for material comforts destroyed peace of mind. There was no point in ‘living like a worm gorging on worldly things’.

  Since families did not always function as ideally they were supposed to, she created a substitute for the family, based not on kin but on free choice, mutual affection and gratitude. She did not conceal that she needed not only to care for others but also to be cared for and to feel protected herself. ‘You are my mother – or daughter or son – from today,’ she would say when she encountered someone hungry for love or attention. ‘I shall look after you.’ Her compassion ignored all the limitations of prudence; she could not refuse help to anyone; eventually, thirty or forty orphans lived in her house at any one time, and in total she raised 485 children. All her meagre earnings were spent on them. Small families bred selfishness, she said. ‘The more relations you have in this world, the better for you.’ Her favourite daughter, who was most devoted to her, was an adopted one. ‘When all my children come to me and call me Mother, my heart swells with joy.’

  She got higher marks than anyone else in her medical examinations, but the male students went on strike to prevent her being awarded the gold medal, which they said had never been given to a woman. She did not protest, and agreed to settle for the silver medal. Nor did she refuse to be the typical obedient wife deferring to her husband without argument: she gave all her salary to him ‘to use it as he thinks best’. The fear of being abandoned by him was like an ever-present noose that threatened to choke her: ‘Who will then look after me?’ And yet at the same time the cruel world that men seemed to delight in disgusted her, a world based on ‘strength and money’, callous towards children forced to ‘do all the work’, ravaged by extortionate moneylenders ‘who take away by force all the cultivator owns and sells the same to dealers at double the price’. Her response was to build her own world side by side with the cruel one and to try to ignore the ‘vanity and pettiness’ of men.

  Haimabati Sen died in the year I was born, 1933, leaving a wonderful autobiography in manuscript, which lay forgotten for two generations until it was rescued and translated by the great historian of ‘sensitivities’, Tapan Raychaudhuri. It is one of the most detailed personal narratives of intimate life to be found anywhere, with the words and the voices of each character preserved in a way that novels can only imitate. Had she lived a century later, she would have been subject to much stronger temptations to become rich, perhaps to emigrate and be a fashionable doctor curing the neuroses or obesity of the overfed. But there are many times more poor people now than there were in her own day, because the world’s population has grown so much, and the complaints about poverty expressed centuries ago show how little has changed. Zhang Tao (1560–1620), a minor official writing when China was experiencing another of its economic booms, and expressing the views of many who were bewildered by shameless displays of luxury, wrote: ‘One man in a hundred is rich while nine out of ten are impoverished. The lord of silver rules everything. Avarice is without limit, everything is for personal pleasure . . . In dealing with others, everything is recompensed down to the last hair . . . The balance between the mighty and the lowly was lost, as both competed for trifling amounts . . . Each exploited the other and everyone publicised himself. Deception sprouted and litigation arose.’ Belief in the fairy tales of progress has continued to obscure repeated disappointment in every era of business expansion. Progress has always produced poverty as well as prosperity. When have most people not been poor? All attempts to abolish poverty have failed, even if some are less poor than they used to be. Ever since money was invented, there has never been enough for everyone to have as much as they want or need. There can never be enough money.

  All the talk about human rights and democracy has done nothing to prevent 85 per cent of the world’s wealth still being owned by a mere tenth of its population. The supposed end of colonialism has not stopped hundreds of billions of dollars being annually transferred from poor to rich countries. Even in the U.S.A., four-fifths of the population still own only 15 per cent of the wealth, while the richest 1 per cent own around one-third. Industrialisation, in its first stages, has regularly impoverished more people than it has enriched. Botswana, the model of African achievement by the criteria of finance – registering economic growth of over 7 per cent for twenty years, and increasing GNP more than sixfold – still has half of its population with less than one dollar a day. After even more impressive economic growth, 55 per cent of India’s urban population live in a space no bigger than 5.5 square metres, which is the minimum specified for U.S. prisons.

  It is well known that Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, which supplements his Wealth of Nations, insists that the creation of wealth must be accompanied by the simultaneous creation of mutual benevolence, sympathy and gratitude. He was convinced that being selfish is not in one’s own interest, for humans need the approval, sympathy and affection of others, and find it beneficial to be concerned about ‘the fortunes of others, regardless of our own self-interest.’ For him, there could be no true prosperity if there was no increase in mutual understanding. But he had no prescription for making people more benevolent. He just hoped that their piety would lead them to recognise that God was benevolent, and that they should therefore model themselves on Him; or else, they should demonstrate their good taste by practising benevolence, because it was ‘pleasing’ and ‘bestows a beauty superior to all others’. Adam Smith would be horrified by what has become of his theories. His prediction was that someone who has only industrial or specialist skills becomes ‘stupid and narrow minded. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgement concerning even the ordinary duties of private life.’

  A different direction might have been taken if more attention had been paid to a pupil of Socrates, Xenophon, known as the ‘Attic Muse’ (born around 444 B.C.), the author of the first book ever written about economics, which originally meant reflection on the best way of running a home and a family. Money was worthless, he said, if it did not lead to a good life. Socrates was wealthier than the we
althiest man in Athens, because though he went barefoot in ragged clothes, refusing to be paid for his teaching, he had all he needed from his stone-mason’s craft and was content with his modest home; whereas the rich man whose properties were worth a hundred times more was burdened with so many obligations to maintain his reputation that he needed three times more than he owned to be sure that ‘the gods and his fellow citizens might tolerate him’. You were only really wealthy if you knew how to use your wealth. Becoming rich meant learning what to do with life as well as with money, rather than just making money. So his book The Economist was about relationships and friendship, and character, and particularly the relations of man and wife, and how there was no point in a wife wearing high heels, enamelling her face with white lead, and colouring her cheeks with rouge from the alkanet plant to win her husband’s admiration any more than he would win hers by smothering himself with cosmetics made for men. The goal of a couple should be to become ‘true helpmates’, a counterpoise and counterpart to each other. They would be truly rich if they were honest, kind and hard-working, enjoying nature and homely pleasures, because ‘the cadence of sweet music dwells even in pots and pans set out in neat array.’ Xenophon takes one back to the most basic form of human interaction, which is communication. But conversations between people who want to understand one another well have still to overcome huge barriers.