It could seem strange that you are reading them at all. You’re hearing about strategies for investment in Spanish real estate, though you are just coping with paying your rent, or getting advice on what to do when a boy who has kissed you then kisses someone else at the same party, though it’s many years since you’ve been at a social gathering where anything remotely like this could happen. You’re exploring the best kind of high-speed motor boat to buy, though you are certainly never going to have to work this out for real, or getting absorbed in a critical assessment of caravan parks in North Wales with special attention to sanitary provisions, attitudes to pets and special offers for the over-60s, though you don’t actually enjoy camping.
The pleasure is real, but a little puzzling. One factor that helps explain it is that we’re encountering different ways of being. The lives we actually lead are tiny slivers of what is imaginatively possible. A slight shift in the past could have led to a very different kind of existence. There are lots of ways we could conceivably have turned out. There’s a self who might have loved the self-reliant freedom of caravanning or relished nautical bravado. There’s a stub of one’s nature that with a different nurture could have evolved into a cocktail drinker or a tycoon or a devoted chess player. Hence the ambivalence. We want to be loyal to who we have become but we sense too that we contain multitudes – many alternative versions of us pursuing a shadowy existence at the back of our minds. And it’s sweet to let some of them advance a little.
We’re also developing areas of kinship. What we think of as a ‘bad’ magazine is always one that other people very much like – the circulation figures are often much higher than those of publications we consider ‘good’. We’re renewing the crucial thought that actually we have more in common with others than sometimes seems to be the case. In particular, it’s the sense of closeness that comes from having an enjoyment in common. The anxieties that circulate around status – contempt and fear – are temporarily pacified. One can briefly commune with the worries and hopes of people whose lives are in many respects radically at odds with one’s own. For a few minutes we develop a more universal capacity for sympathy. And if we keep the knowledge of this pleasure somewhere in our minds we become slightly more generous, less dismissive, versions of ourselves.
Scanning the pages of these magazines is an indulgent pleasure: you’re allowed to be off the hook for a little while; you don’t have to worry about the consequences; you don’t have to be good. There are parts of oneself that are less clever, less controlled, less serious, less responsible, less realistic than the self one is normally required – by the demands of maturity – to be.
And an essential part of the pleasure is that we can, before too very long, close the magazine and put it away. This isn’t a craving; we’re not addicted. It’s a small pleasure, not an overwhelming one that threatens to rob us of our freedom to put it aside.
32
The Song You Want to Listen to Again and Again
Maybe you felt an amazing thrill the moment you heard it; maybe you didn’t think much of it at first – actually you kept on meaning to skip it; it was the next song you were really interested in. But it’s grown on you. Maybe you’ve liked it for years but only now become obsessed with it. It might be a favourite from ages back that was linked to a specific period of your existence – you were 17 and in love, but too shy to do anything about it. You longed to dance to this song with that person – but you never did. Recently you were in a taxi and it came on the radio and you nearly cried on the way to the airport. You’ve looked it up and reconnected with it. Now you want to hear it all the time. And when you’re not listening to it, it’s still playing somewhere at the back of your mind.
You don’t necessarily love everything about it. Sometimes you’re waiting for the wonderful bit where they spin out a particular word – to-ni-i-i-i-i-ght – with the voice going up, then down, then up again in the middle in a magical way. It’s such a tiny thing, a few seconds of sound, but in that space you seem to hear so much – as if everything lovely was being summed up in a wordless moment. Or there’s a point when the rhythm suddenly breaks, changes pace and takes off into a soaring, pulsing section. Or when the voice and the orchestra seem to melt into each other in a brief passage of profound lyrical beauty.
We know we love it. But we don’t automatically grasp quite why this song touches us so deeply and gives such pleasure. And why do we want to return to it again and again?
Our brains seem to be naturally attuned to take their cue from sounds. Gently undulating lullabies are used round the world to settle children to sleep; the murmured tones of an endearment conveys love as much as the words; in a row, the bitter accents wound as much as the accusations. The mere sounds of Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’, for instance, seem to enfold us in tenderness. The rising passages of ‘La Marseillaise’ have thrilled people around the world for two centuries, even though pretty much everyone one is hazy about what the words might actually mean: the sound itself reliably fires up energetic, ambitious emotions.
A song recognises something that’s often missing from communication across the rest of our lives. In ‘Hey Jude’, the Beatles offer some fundamental advice: don’t be afraid – and it’s moving because the music makes us feel we’re being liked as the fearful, hesitant people we are. We’re being understood and sympathised with before we’re being reminded that, in fact, we should make some bolder, more risky moves. It’s the opposite of the unhelpful way good advice so often arrives: as a rebuke, as exasperation, as disbelief at our ineptitude. The words ‘don’t be afraid’ can be uttered in a million different ways. But very few are actually helpful. Lennon and McCartney discovered an ideal way of getting the advice past our layers of defensive reluctance. They created an ideal emotional environment out of tone and rhythm so we’re in the right frame of mind before being reminded we need to do something inherently difficult – take a risk with love.
To take a classical example, Mozart’s aria ‘Soave sia il vento’ – blow gently, breezes – makes an impossible plea. It asks that nature let the people we love off the hook. In the specific context of the song it’s asking that the boat a couple of young men are sailing in will meet with tranquil seas. But it widens to embrace all the fears we have – that those we are close to are endlessly exposed to danger and disaster that is really out of our power to prevent: the oncoming truck that veers madly across the highway, the horrific growth of cancerous cells, betrayal by others they trust, the pinions of a bike front wheel failing as they joyfully career down a lonely mountain track. And at the same time it gently insists that we have no power whatever to avert these disasters. We hope, but we are actually impotent. And therefore the song is asking us to do something profound: to appreciate properly these often very imperfect people by recognising their essential vulnerability. But it does not ask us to entertain this crucial but fearsome thought until it has coaxed us into a mood of tenderness. The melody is one of Mozart’s most beautiful – gracious and sad, simple and tender. The music knows it is asking something difficult and understands we have to be settled into the right frame of mind before being confronted with a dark, but deep, thought.
We return to a song because we want to return to the state of insight the song promotes – a state that’s normally fragile and, hence, fleeting. Eventually, you’ll tire of it. You’ll be listening to it and start to feel you wish you weren’t. The words won’t thrill you as they used to. It can feel a bit sad. But really it means something rather nice. You’ve not used it up or spoilt it by overexposure. Instead, you have fully taken possession of what you needed from it and for the time being you don’t need to learn its lesson anymore. Your pleasure was the bodily signal of a benign educational experience. By a slightly basic analogy we can think of a child who for a while delights in singing the alphabet song or a little ditty that involves reciting the days of the week in the correct order. We can sense that they are taking pleasure in the acquisition of knowledge that
– to them – feels important and exciting. But before too long the charm fades for them. It’s because they have now fixed this fragment of wisdom in their minds. They might revert to it from time to time when the occasion demands that they recall which day follows Wednesday, but it’s no longer something they sing to themselves in the back seat of the car.
Our adult needs for understanding are much more complex. What we’re learning might be hard to sum up in a sentence, and might be an attitude rather than a chunk of information. But the underlying process is the same. Its demise isn’t to be lamented. We have, for the time being, made its truth our own.
33
A Book That Understands You
You’re turning the pages and a very strange – and very nice – thing dawns on you. This book gets you. Obviously the author (who might have died centuries back) never knew you at all. But they write as if they did. It’s as if you’d confessed your secrets to them and then they’d gone off and written this work around what you’d told them – transformed, of course, into a story about people with different names or into an essay that doesn’t cite your case explicitly, but might as well do so, because it’s completely on target.
We never quite feel we’re understood well enough even by the people who we genuinely like and who are emotionally attached to us – and who might at times be very generous, sweet or compassionate. The permafrost of loneliness persists below the surface even when things are, broadly speaking, going well enough.
The book in question might be one that speaks to millions – like the Harry Potter series. Or it could be an almost unique discovery of your own: Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, written at the very end of the eighteenth century, with its haunting efforts to fuse a noble idealism with political realism. It could be a self-help book about sex that alights on just the thing that’s troubling you. Or you might feel that Mademoiselle de Maupin, written by Théophile Gautier in the middle of the nineteenth century – which tells the story of a man and a woman who are both in love with the central character, the opera singer Madeleine de Maupin, and which is deeply tender towards the complexities of sexual desire – was written, by a historical miracle, exactly for you.
A book knows you by pinpointing – and taking very seriously – a major but often ignored problem that happens to be looming in your existence. For instance, when Harry Potter is with the Dursleys: the feeling of being an alien in a familiar environment. For long stretches of time Harry has to live around people who have no idea of his real nature, they never acknowledge his actual strengths and he is regarded as a contemptible freak for things that elsewhere would make him popular and important. The book is hugely alive to the feeling of not being appreciated.
We’re pleased because we’re encountering sympathy for things that deserve generous treatment but normally don’t get it. This is what happens with Balzac’s Lost Illusions. The central character, Lucien, does many objectively quite awful things: he’s selfish, greedy, vain, he takes advantage of his friends and he makes big mistakes with his career. Balzac isn’t presenting any of this as anything other than very bad. But he’s deeply attentive to the forces at work around Lucien (his longing to be a success in a world stacked against him) and in him (his fear of humiliation). And it’s clear Balzac very much likes this character. The darker aspects of one’s character are getting a tender hearing: you have been hurt; you have hurt others. And the book says: I know.
In Middlemarch, George Eliot tells the story of Dorothea Brooke. She’s easy to ridicule. She’s got some advantages and she longs to help the world, but in fact she never does much. She makes a very unhappy marriage and wastes a large portion of her life lamenting it. In an obvious way it’s all her own fault. She has plenty of chances and misses them all. It’s not a self-description one is likely to be keen to avow to others. But it describes a side of many people’s experience. We feel very much like this, sometimes. George Eliot isn’t saying this is actually rather charming. What she offers is validation: this is what can happen to a very reasonable, well-intentioned person. It doesn’t push you off the human map.
To be generously understood is nice of course – hence the pleasure – but it’s a bigger thing than that. It’s helpful. Because feeling alone with difficult parts of oneself increases the trouble. We’re haunted by the worry that no reasonable person could feel anything but derision or contempt for our problems. We fear to share them with our friends because we anticipate bewildered rejection. The book that understands is like an ideal parent or friend who makes it acceptable to suffer in the way we do. Our weirder sorrows – or enjoyments – are recast as valid parts of human experience, which can be met with sympathy and kindness.
34
Crying Cathartically Over the Death of a Fictional Character
We know they’re not real. They never were alive so they can’t actually have died at all. Yet hearing about their imagined end is hugely affecting. If the circumstances are sufficiently private – lying on the bed in a dressing-gown on Sunday afternoon with the book open in a shaft of sunlight – one might frown, the upper lip puckers, the eyes are intensely shut and the sobbing starts. The tears are running down one’s cheek. And when it’s over we feel deeply calm and rather happy. But unlike the real versions of death, we don’t keep on being grimly struck by the return of the terrible fact: they are dead. We can anyway just skip back a few pages and there they are again, as much alive as they ever were. But why do we actually enjoy crying over their death?
In Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series – written in the second half of the nineteenth century – we live with his central character Glencora Palliser though six long books. She was so nice; she suffered a lot in her long marriage but eventually learned to love her difficult husband. She was funny and naughty and kind. By the last novel she is still only in her forties, but she’s very ill. Perhaps it’s her heart; perhaps it’s cancer – Trollope doesn’t go into detail. Her children are stumbling towards adulthood and are very much in need of her; their father, though deeply loving, is distant, stern and preoccupied with his political career. Glencora was a slightly wild girl who evolved into an ideal mother. She never forgot her own past unhappiness, when she was disappointed in an early relationship – and that constant awareness is a source of her tenderness towards her children; she is warm, forgiving and desperate to shield them from the worst consequences of their own mistakes. So, when she dies, we’re witnessing the loss of this lovely quality.
Genuinely lovely things – the things the character has reminded us we deeply need and admire – often seem quite weak in the world. There are more powerful forces: a mother’s love can’t beat cancer; a teasing, warm, funny mind is still enshrined in a horribly vulnerable case of flesh. We are crying, in part because we are recognising ourselves as very strange sorts of entities, destined to be most attached to things that are frighteningly transient. For a moment we are feeling justifiably sorry for ourselves that this is so. And, sadly, it’s not just an imaginary person in a book who has died. The very thing we’ve come to love in them, and whose loss we mourn, has been damaged, even ‘killed’, by us, from time to time in ourselves. We’ve been sometimes sour and righteous and unyielding. We’ve been at odds with and disloyal to the lovely things about this person. And we’re sorry.
It’s very touching, too, to read of the death of a young Russian soldier, Petya Rostov, which occurs near the end of Tolstoy’s War and Peace. He’s a rather minor character, the young brother of Nikolai and Natasha, who figure much more prominently. His death occurs towards the end of the French campaign of 1812 in Russia. Moscow has already burned, the French armies are in desperate retreat westwards through the snow and blizzards. They are being chased by Cossack troops accompanied by a few officers from the regular army. Amongst them – the most junior of subalterns – is Petya. He’s so young, perhaps just 16. He’s on the threshold of life. He is so desperate to join in and do something to help his country. He’s forthright
and eager and loyal. Then in the night he gets caught in sniper fire and is fatally wounded. But what’s most moving is that another character, Dolokhov, who is otherwise a rather brutish man, tries to shield him and feels the horror of this young life being destroyed and weeps beside him in the snow. It’s a high point of Tolstoy’s artistry to give this tender role to Dolokhov. Because this tough individual, who is generally indifferent to the suffering of others, is a version of us, the reader. We’re not thuggish like him, but in our own ways we are often wrapped up in a cloak of indifference. We’ve become hardened, we’ve had to filter out so much. We’re weeping not simply for the death of this character, but for an elemental fact that’s being portrayed through Petya: the idiotic randomness of death.
We’re being brought up against how we would feel if some much altered (but emotionally connected) version of this did occur in our lives. No one deserves to die. Yet anyone’s life can be cut off in a moment. We are being resensitised, by a made-up story, to a profound fact. And via that we are, ideally, reactivated in an important area of appreciation. Petya’s parents and brother and sister were often exasperated by him; he wasn’t a perfect person. He skipped his homework; he was a bit full of himself; he had some silly ideas. But these seem – after the bullet – such minor things. Death reorganises our priorities; it changes our scale of assessment. His parents would give anything to have him be disobedient or arrogant again, so long as he was back.
We’re weeping not simply about the demise of a fictional character, we’re crying in acknowledgement of a painful truth. We may only realise the full extent of our love for people too late. We are being agonisingly alerted not just to a possible loss, but to a failure of our own. In crying, we are taking the warning to heart and wishing, if only we could, to properly love the desperately imperfect people at the centre of our lives while there is still time.
Small Pleasures Page 7
