Small Pleasures

by The School Of Life

  Another side of our tears comes into focus around the death of a dog, Argos, recounted in the ancient story of The Odyssey – which tells of the long wandering of Ulysses on his journey from the siege of Troy back to his troubled home in Ithaca. Ulysses is the king of the small island but when he gets back he’s alone and in disguise. He’s been away for 20 years. He looks like a worn-out old beggar. Almost everyone has long ago given him up for dead. There’s no happy, wonderful reception for him. He’s alone and his house is filled with arrogant, boorish rivals who want to claim his wife and seize his kingdom. But at this grim moment, when he’s facing these problems, something wonderful happens. Argos, his old hunting dog, approaches. He’s diseased and his coat is infested with lice. He had been waiting and watching for his master’s return and now he recognises him, and a deep love and joy give him the strength to rouse himself and go to greet him. But the effort is too much. It’s his last quietly heroic act. And he dies.

  ‘Argos passed into the darkness of death, now that he had fulfilled his destiny of faith and seen his master once more.’ The Odyssey, Book

  The death of Argos can be so moving because through him we’re being reconnected with our own past suffering. We’ve lost so many things that were important to us: childhood innocence, a former relationship, an avenue of trust, a level of confidence that got punctured. Like him, we were always watching for this return. We find echoes of all these things in the fate of Argos. But with this one crucial difference. What he loved came back. For us it never will, because it never can. It is ourselves we are weeping for.

  The tears are a pleasure because we know we’re responding rightly – we are experiencing the generosity in ourselves that responds so warmly, so intensely, to the imagined situation. We are crying because, in our deeply muddled and often very difficult lives, in which we have every reason to think ill of ourselves, we are suddenly reminded of our own remarkable, real and often hidden capacity for pure goodness.

  35

  Pleasant Exhaustion After a Productive Day

  It’s 9.45 pm. You put in an extra, late spurt – for supper you had a toasted sandwich at your desk, brushing the occasional crumb from the keyboard while you kept at it. It was difficult. But now it’s done. You’ve made the progress you’d hoped to. Probably, it will all start again in the morning, but you’ll be working off a solid base – it won’t be the familiar scramble to catch up.

  You’re worn out. You had to make yourself stick at it – but now you’re glad you did. There’s a gentle ache in the middle of your back. You yawn and turn your neck from side to side; you stretch round and try to massage an awkward spot below your left shoulder blade. In a while you’ll need to head off to bed – but not just yet. It’s nice to linger and spin out the moment of repletion. It’s lovely to saunter about and make a cup of tea or let some wine gurgle from the bottle into a glass. You might flick indifferently through the newspaper. You can’t get engaged: your brain has done its work and shies away from any further effort.

  The pleasure we feel after a good but hard day’s work is linked to a positive experience of willpower. It was tempting to break off; you could have put it off until tomorrow (you’ve often done that in the past); you could have become distracted (which is achingly familiar); you could have stayed physically at your desk but actually been fantasising about glamorous apartments in New York or finding out what a TV personality is up to at the moment. But you didn’t. You stuck with the big thing.

  It’s also to do with a sense of mastery: in anticipation we slightly feared the task. But we got on top of this tricky thing and we tamed it. There were points when it felt we might not: it was too difficult; a solution seemed elusive; there were too many things we were trying to get right at the same time; a mass of details needed to be reduced to a simple, coherent shape – though it wasn’t at all obvious what this could be. An awkward email needed a tactful but firm response; a refusal had to be delivered without a sting; a criticism needed to be put forward delicately but very clearly. A hunch had to be turned into a proposal – and there’s always a difficult point at which what had, from a distance, seemed like a good idea starts to look much less impressive close up, yet it was onto something … only what exactly? Maybe you had to revise a report and you dreaded unpicking work you had already done and facing the same old issues once again. We’ve been labouring against the normal forces of disintegration. Things that were scattered and messy have been brought together, harmonised, tidied up, elucidated. We’ve done something fundamental. We’ve held back the tide of chaos.

  The pleasure of a long productive day hints at a bigger theme. It’s not simply about this moment and the particular tasks we’ve polished off. It’s a promise that other problems can be faced as well. We’re reminded of a capacity within ourselves to deal with difficulties, to get on top of challenges and to keep going until they are under control. We’re seeing in ourselves an antidote to the fear of drifting. We naturally worry we’ll be swamped by demands; we know our own unfortunate tendency to let things fester. But right now, we’re conscious of something else. We’re capable of rousing ourselves, of focus and of sustained effort. We can stick with something difficult and keep going through the temptations to break off and seek distraction. We’ve been just a little bit heroic and we know it and it feels nice.

  Instead of exhaustion being – as it so often is – a reason to have to give up because one’s strength has failed too soon, the brain starts to melt when really we should be getting on with a big task, the mind is worn out while the problem remains unsolved; instead, now, we’re experiencing honourable or worthy tiredness. Instead of getting annoyed with ourselves for lacking energy, our pleasant tiredness feels like the natural and just reward for our labours. It’s setting us up for a good night’s sleep.

  36

  Old Photos of One’s Parents

  She is on a beach in a one-piece bathing suit, grinning wildly, looking deeply proud of something, standing next to a boy you don’t recognise – her cousin Kenneth? It’s your mother aged maybe 7 or 8 (and a half it must be, because her birthday is in December and she never went to the other side of the world until she was 23 to spend a year teaching at a school in Brisbane). You try to work out the year the photo would have been taken. While she was making sandcastles – which she still likes to do with your little niece – and splashing her friends, were students throwing rocks at the police in the side streets of Paris? At that exact time, were NASA scientists racing to sort out a problem with the booster rockets for the first moon landing which would occur that autumn? (It’s a family story that she was allowed to stay up late to watch it live on TV.) What was it like to be alive then and to feel these events not as history but simply as the vague current background to a summer holiday by the sea?

  In another picture, your father looks unfeasibly slender, but his shoulders, typically, are slightly hunched. He’s sitting outside a bar – it looks like somewhere in Venice – with strange masses of chestnut hair. Even when he had it he couldn’t control it. Who could have taken this picture? You should ask him sometime, though conversations with him aren’t necessarily your favourite thing right now. It must have been years before he met your mother because in their wedding photos he’s already put on weight and his hairline has started to move. Was he still studying? Was he going out with someone? You remember your mother asking about someone called Sandra and your father saying ‘I really can’t bear to find out how she’s getting on’ – and then being a bit silent. But he often lapses into silence so it’s hard to know if it’s significant. Yet in the photo he looks eager and engaged, as if there’s something witty he’s about to say.

  Our parents are – in a certain sense – amongst the people we know best in the world. We passed so long in their company. We’ve had far more meals with them than their best friends have. We know them as we know few others: we’ve seen them in their seven o’clock in the morning guise, we’ve seen them anxious and occasionally f
urious, we’ve been cradled in their arms, we’ve seen their underwear drawer and their toenails, and we are expert judges of their ability to erect a tent or make a dish of macaroni cheese.

  But looking at the photos we realise that in other ways we hardly know them at all. What was it actually like to be them? If you could know them at the same age, would you like them? Would you feel a strange kinship? And, today, what are they like along with their friends? What parts of their character have you maybe not seen properly yet?

  The pleasure, below the surface, is of an increase in love. Inevitably, there has to be plenty about a parent that is irksome – it’s scarcely possible to grow up without feeling in some ways let down by one’s parents. It’s not exclusively their fault – especially if they have tried quite hard to be good parents to us. It’s rather that as we grow they can’t live up to the admiring, passionate love we once had for them. The person who – when we were 6 – appeared majestic, wise, endlessly funny and bountiful will in time be revealed as fussy, intermittently slothful and hyperactive; they will be seen to harbour eccentric preoccupations; they will embarrass us; they will get baffled by trivial problems; at crucial moments they will fail us in profound ways – entirely without meaning to.

  The photos make us realise something we find almost impossible to grasp when we are children: our parent’s life wasn’t mainly about us. They didn’t spend their entire existence gearing up for us. In these pictures they had no idea whatever of what would happen in the future. You were raised by a girl with a naughty smirk and a shy young man – not by perfectly mature adults who unaccountably got some key things wrong. Guided by these images we become – if only for a little while – more forgiving and more accommodating towards these nice, strange people who happen to have given us our lives.

  One day, perhaps, another person will look at a photo of you – a photo whose meaning to you is transparent and every detail of the experience is vivid and evocative – and feel the same kind of tender, puzzled curiosity. And perhaps they will wonder, in their turn, what their mother or father was like when they were young and who they really are in the full, complex expanse of their being?

  37

  Whispering in Bed in the Dark

  You can’t even see each other’s noses, though they are just a few inches apart. The darkness isn’t separating you, it’s bringing you together. Theoretically it shouldn’t really matter – as far as the wider world is concerned you are just as secluded in the brightly lit kitchen. But having the lights out reassures a more primitive anxiety: if we can see, we can be seen. It’s the same reason why whispering feels necessary: it intensifies the atmosphere of seclusion.

  The ancient philosopher Diogenes, who made his home in a disused wine barrel in a main street of Athens, took the view that if you are willing to do something in private you should have the courage to do it in public too (masturbation was one of his favourite topics of intellectual discourse). He was onto something, but also missing something important: deep privacy is genuinely liberating. It’s actually rather nice that we are concerned to present a more restrained, adult and reasonable face to the world. But, it’s true, we’re not revealing the whole of who we are. And this is what gives whispering in the dark its special place in our lives. We have all the liberating benefits of being alone – but we are also with another person.

  The darkness also marks an important separation from the rest of the day. The things that occupied you no longer feel relevant – for a while, anyway. Our feelings and thoughts are so liable to be dominated by the external demands of life. It’s quite difficult to switch them off. We need the assistance of big, external cues. In the dark, other senses come to the fore. Every detail of the voice becomes more noticeable. Nothing significant is being discussed but something significant is happening.

  Sometimes you use pet names: Lillybilly and Billylilly, Blinker and Stinker. They can sound silly if they’re pronounced in the middle of the day. But now they help us shed, strategically and briefly, major parts of our lives – so that other key things about us can get a chance to shine. Lillybilly isn’t pursuing a career in finance; Stinker isn’t a vigorous logical reasoner; Billylilly doesn’t care whose turn it is to stack the dishwasher; Blinker doesn’t know what a mortgage is. Quite possibly no one in the world knows you use them. They set you apart. They mark us out (at the moment) as ‘us’, quite different from all of ‘them’. No one can overhear anyway, but whispering feels natural: you are sharing a deep secret.

  You want to giggle; you feel playful. You say silly things that normally you’d censor. You can tell someone you love them. It often becomes tricky to do this at other times. Our practical, responsible, ambitious and anxious selves find it increasingly hard to make this assertion: the idea of love gets awkwardly caught up in minor irritations and differences of opinion. It can feel too tricky to be emotionally vulnerable (because to tell someone you love them is to risk them not responding with adequate warmth). But now it’s different. The complicating factors don’t matter just at the moment. So you can be tender and open without so much fear.

  You are joining forces with your childhood self. When you were little you loved to go exploring down to the bottom of the bed – your mother pretended to not know what could be down there, she’d pat you and wonder out loud: ‘What’s this big lump? Could it be a pillow? No, it’s a bit hard for a pillow (another vigorous pat). I hope it’s not a crocodile escaped from the zoo.’ And you’d almost believe she might mean it – though really her mind was mainly on the fact that the bed would need to be remade and that if you got too excited you wouldn’t get to sleep. You had the idea it would be nice to sleep upside down, with your head where your feet would normally be – but it’s actually not very nice after about a minute.

  There were other times you pulled the blankets over your head and the normal arrangements of the world no longer applied: you could imagine you lived in an igloo or were a baby beaver safe in a little house on the dam in the middle of a pond; you could be a snail inside its shell. Or you could be a pirate with a sword, a cruel laugh and lots of captives, all tied up.

  When your cousins came to stay you used to all try to get under the covers together in your pyjamas after brushing your teeth – four was a lovely squeeze – until an adult came in and told everyone to go to their own beds and mattresses. One of those times a cousin told you all what ‘fuck’ means – though she didn’t get it quite right.

  You explore a hip bone or a thigh. Your toes touch. It’s not overtly sexual, just at the moment, though you might get there later. There are other pleasures – less urgent – but just as real that occupy us now.

  38

  Cypress Trees

  You don’t often pay much attention to trees, but you always like it when you do. And a cypress might only catch your eye very occasionally. There was one in your aunt’s garden, but she moved house a few years ago. You have a hazy memory of a scene you felt was rather lovely in a film – it was on a hillside somewhere Mediterranean (was it set in Malta?) and in the background there was a hillside with some cypress trees. And strangely it’s the background that’s stuck in your mind all these years. And once you went to an old hotel that had a terrace with a row of cypress trees in large stone basins. You always had a soft spot for cypress trees, but you haven’t thought much about it.

  They are very distinctive entities. The pencil, or Tuscan evergreen cypress, doesn’t spread itself out. Sometimes you might feel they are shy. At others times the idea of being aloof comes to mind. They are very private: there’s the dark intensity to their colouring. They do well in graveyards. The sides form themselves into long upright curves but the top tends to be jagged. Once you start looking carefully you find it’s quite hard to identify each branch and every little irregularity of the shape of one individual tree. It’s especially nice when you see a cluster of them on the horizon jutting into a clear blue sky.

  The enjoyment of seeing a cypress tree isn’t just to do w
ith how nice they look. There’s also a pleasure of identification: the sense that despite all the obvious differences the tree has something to teach us – it is a living sermon on endurance.

  They survive a very long time. A large one could have been around when the Third Estate took the Tennis Court Oath and unwittingly set the events of the French Revolution in motion; it may have suffered in the ‘great winter’ of 1708–9, the worst of its immensely long life. Its bark was probably thickening and it was just getting going when Florentine bankers were funding the Renaissance.

  And any particular tree you happen to come across could well have hundreds of years still to live. When we’re in a nursing home doing a jigsaw, it will be doing fine. It could still be around when there are cities in Antarctica, when the first human–robot wedding is celebrated, when Mars becomes self-governing.

  A tree can’t flee or alter its environment. It is stuck in the single place where it was planted or where the seed happened to fall into a little crevice. Naturally, we’re attracted to the idea of being able to alter our condition, but sometimes we just have to put up with difficulties. We’re not being pathetic or weak. Our bigger commitments tie us to a situation. Or we’re facing things that – like a broken leg, a downturn in the economy or the fact of ageing – we don’t have the power to do anything much about. We’re stuck with something and then ideally we’d be more like the cypress, clinging on, keeping going. They are so patient. They put up with so much.

  They manage to grow well in places that don’t look especially hospitable – the hillside seems stony and dry, the wind howls, the sun is intense. But they somehow extract enough moisture from the soil. They resist summer fires and renew themselves in the charred landscape. They are evergreen – they don’t change with the seasons. What’s happening outside doesn’t alter what’s happening inside them. They grow very slowly, but they do grow; maturation takes so long.