Small Pleasures

by The School Of Life

  During the hours of darkness, the petals fold inwards and close up, and they reopen in the morning (which was the origin of their name: ‘day’s eye’). It is obvious, today, that the action of the flower is purely mechanical: the petals are actually arranged in two overlapping layers – though this isn’t obvious unless you look out for it. When the light levels fall below a particular level, the lower ring of petals grows very slightly faster than the upper one and, because of the intricate way the petals are interleaved, this causes the whole head to close. But it is unsurprising that to earlier, more imaginative, ages this nightly ritual implied obscure impulses of exhaustion or lamentation; the daisy was sleeping or possibly mourning the absence of its lover, the sun. It was a benign misconception, suggesting a spiritual affinity of man and plant.

  But, still, we can see the daisy as subject – like us – to a daily rhythm. It’s not specifically the degree of ambient light that regulates our behaviour, but external, biological factors dominate our lives as well, though we typically resist the assertion that they do. We don’t like to think that we might be upset by a colleague in part because it is raining and cold or that our feeling that a relationship is on the ropes may be in large part due to the fact that we’re tired. We usually reserve these generous insights for babies, whose darker moods we readily assign to hunger or being too hot or needing a sleep. In a slightly wiser world, one might think as one’s partner turns sour over a trivial matter: ‘It’s Sunday evening, their emotional petals are closing.’

  Once we actually pay them proper attention, daisies are not only beautiful and charming in themselves. They also provide an unexpected, yet telling, point of access to a major cultural issue: the imperfect distribution of cultural prestige. Because – in spite of how nice they really are – daisies are not taken seriously.

  You can’t actually buy an ordinary daisy. The nearest you can get is ordering a packet of daisy seeds or (at an extreme) buying a house with daisies growing on the lawn. But you don’t see them in florists’ shops and Interflora don’t deliver them. We don’t give each other bunches of daisies to mark special occasions. We don’t go for special trips to look at famous daisy gardens. Couples don’t purchase a single daisy as a token of their love. This isn’t really evidence of any failure on the part of this particular flower. Rather, it’s an oversight on our part. We disdain the daisy for an unfortunate reason: it is abundant. It’s a victim of the unfortunate idea that to be special something has to be rare. Prestige is the current collective list of what is worthy of attention – the public guide to what might be enjoyable or nice; but it isn’t necessarily as yet complete.

  Small, pretty and very common, the daisy is (amongst other good things) a guide to the ideal economy of the future.

  51

  Figs

  Every so often, you encounter a fig. It might turn up as a decorative aside to a dessert at a smart restaurant you occasionally go to when you want to mark a special occasion; from a couple of years back you remember there were baskets of them in the market in Cadiz which caught your eye, but you couldn’t pluck up the courage to join the bustle at the stall and actually buy some; your sister puts them in the adventurous salads she sometimes serves; and they’re in the supermarket somewhere but you’re usually in hyperfocused mode there and race as fast as possible to the things you always buy.

  Between these sporadic meetings, you don’t think much about figs at all. Their existence is just one of a billion facts of which you are peripherally, passively aware.

  But when a fig does come your way, you are always rather charmed. The colours inside are lovely, of course. And the slightly dry texture of the flesh and its quiet taste are pleasant. You like figs, you remind yourself. And then it might be half a year before another lands in front of you on a plate. You’re hardly even sure when their season is (do they even have one?).

  It’s a curious type of situation: there’s a small pleasure we have, but we leave having it very much to chance. And even when we do have the opportunity, often a lot of other things get in the way: the conversation takes a lively turn; your little nephew starts to wail in his bassinet; the combination is a bit unfortunate (the cacao bean chocolate was very nice but it annihilated the figs).

  To work against this randomness, we need to invoke an idea that initially can sound a bit remote: ritual. We might initially associate ritual with archaic ceremonies, like a coronation, or with cultish gatherings. But there are more helpful images: the tiny ritual of blowing out the candles on a birthday cake and making a wish before cutting the first slice – slightly garbled traces of rather nice ideas: a birthday marks the end of one year of life and the beginning of the next; we should ideally focus our minds on transience and hope. And maybe the ritual was once more explicitly geared to helping us do this.

  When we boil it down to its essence, the point of a ritual is to mandate a set of actions and attitudes in order to get us into a valuable state of mind. It is – like a recipe – a set of rules that, if we follow them carefully, will bring about a certain result; not in this case a bowl of watercress soup or a crème brûlée, but, rather, a state of heightened appreciation. Unlike a recipe, a ritual usually comes with instructions about when you have to do it. Recipes leave it up to us – when you happen to feel like making a risotto, here’s what to do. But a ritual includes directions about when you should do it – every 365 days after your birth, when the new moon rises or when the cherry or plum trees are in blossom (as with Hanami, ritualised picnics in Japan devoted to an appreciation of the transience of natural beauty). The ritual comes with a date; it makes an appointment in your diary, placed there by your culture. The ritual is rightly worried we’ll forget to pursue a particular pleasure – so it comes with a reminder.

  Often with a ritual, the details have been honed and refined over a long period of time. People have thought quite hard how to get the most out of what they were doing. Rituals frequently invite us to quite specific patterns of thought and action. The Jicarilla Apache of New Mexico, for example, have an elaborate ceremony for adolescent girls which lasts for several days, The girls must wear special costumes and must pay close attention to particular stories and songs – designed to foreground a range of admirable qualities. The ritual is hugely ambitious because it aims to transform how they think about themselves and how they see their place in society.

  If we were to invent a ritual around appreciation of the fig, it could go like this:

  Every Tuesday, after work, we’ll pick up some figs from the grocery opposite the train station. Place the fig on a plain white plate the first few times – the better to concentrate on the delicate, cool green hues of the skin. Later you can experiment with another background: celadon or maybe black. Before you do anything else, take a moment to contemplate the essential strangeness of this small fruit. It could have evolved more like an acorn: highly effective from the point of view of propagation, but alien to the human system. It could have been more like the strawberry – so sweet and obviously charming as to be already utterly familiar. The fig, at this moment, is our point of entry.

  With a very sharp knife, cut it into quarters, lengthwise. The need for sharpness doesn’t arise from hardness but because they are soft; blunt pressure would spoil them. The edges of the pieces should be clean and the inner surface perfectly flat. Look at the tints and hues of the flesh. For 15 seconds, imagine you are a painter, trying to portray the pattern: make your eyes stick with it.

  Think of the tree it came from. This particular piece of fruit might have ripened in a plastic tunnel outside Basingstoke, but its ancestors flourished in historic times in Palestine or in Sicily and figured in the parables of tribes. Squeeze a few drops of lemon onto the sliced flesh – some will miss (it’s hard to aim with a lemon). This will intensify the flavour. Finally, take a bite. Concentrate first on the texture. Then, with a second bite, focus on the taste. The ritual of the fig should last about seven minutes.

  The ritual reminds u
s what to do in order to have a nicer time. It operates with a benign idea of rules and regulations. They’re not, in this case, to stop us doing something that might be rather convenient at this moment. Instead, they guide us to having a better time. This approach to rules is a revision of the Romantic ideal of spontaneity, the luck moment, which is excited by ideas of happy accidents and chance encounters. It’s not that these are always terrible ideas at all. It’s just that they aren’t the only template we need. If we only follow them, a lot of good things won’t happen, or will happen only very rarely, when your sister just happens to take it into her head to ask you round to lunch.

  Small pleasures need rituals. The irony (as it were) of the small pleasure is that it isn’t intense enough usually to force itself upon us – we don’t become addicted or obsessed; the pull is much weaker than that of sex or video games or drinking wine or wolfing down a bar of chocolate; these are pleasures we need no reminding of, and we often have to painfully struggle to limit their sway in our lives. With small pleasures it’s the opposite. We’re more likely to lose touch with them. They easily get crowded out. We actively need to build up their presence in our lives.

  52

  A List of Very Small Pleasures

  Once we’re on the lookout for them, life seems filled with small pleasures. The point isn’t simply to note them but to understand why we like them – which intensifies and deepens the satisfaction they offer. And then to make a more reliable, larger place for them in our lives.

  One

  Tidying a cupboard: a bounded task, you can get it absolutely right – while most things in life are a bit of a fudge; pleasant busyness when there’s no real hurry; pride in being fussy about little details; don’t necessarily tell anyone; you are doing it for yourself; lovely when it’s done: a tiny part of life is now solved; pop back later to admire your creation.

  Two

  Borrowing a friend’s scarf: it doesn’t quite suit; by wearing it you are making a statement; nicely intimate; being part of a team of two; sweetly hesitant foreplay: ‘it’s so cold … you know, you could borrow a scarf … if you want to’; look at it in the cupboard and think nice thoughts about its real owner; ideally you are always going to return it but never quite do – and they’re secretly pleased.

  Three

  Aphorisms: nicely compact, portable; the pleasure of summing up; they are always a bit wrong if you push them too hard; but you don’t mind; on the lookout for a chance to use them; this bit of wisdom is now yours.

  Four

  Memorising a line of poetry: ‘If I should die, think only this of me …’; ‘and all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well’; ‘If I had world enough and time …’; hard to get the rhythm perfect; don’t worry about what comes next; your own thoughts build around it; occasionally reveal one, shyly, to a friend, though it will never mean quite to them what it means to you.

  Five

  Saying ‘fuck’ (if you usually don’t): you’re tougher than you supposed; sometimes for the sheer drama of surprising people (did they really just say ‘fuck’?); very nice when praising a refined merit (‘so fucking noble and tender’); cathartic when you drop a saucepan on your toe (‘oh fuck’); the less you swear the more enjoyable a good ‘fuck’ gets.

  Six

  Sharpening a pencil: metal pencil sharpener; changeable blade (though you have never changed it); finding the perfect balance between forward pressure and rotation; the simplest machine – impossible to improve; not too sharp, so the lead gouges the paper or snaps off.

  Seven

  Picnics in odd places: on a tiny roof garden surrounded by tomato plants; sheltering behind a rock on a windy winter’s day by the sea; in a tree house; on the kitchen floor. A familiar thing in a new place; mutual revelation.

  Eight

  Celadon blue: or perhaps it is really a shade of green; hard to decide; it’s serene without being passive; cool and ample – your gaze can rest in it; quiet; best for small, curved things – a bowl, a vase, a pair of socks; lovely against white.

  Nine

  Learning how to forgive: the pain could be from years back – the bully, the bastard, the bitch who hurt you; outwardly you said it didn’t matter anymore, but you still hated them; forgiveness isn’t just forgetting, it’s reimagining the person who wounded you; they had their troubles surely, however well they hid them, though you may never know what they were; they lashed out because they were lashed at by someone or something; you’re cleaner, more relaxed as bitterness melts away.

  Ten

  The extraordinary heat as you walk down the plane steps: it’s physical, in your lungs, pressing on your forehead; it warms the muscles deep in the shoulders; it implies awnings, big rotating fans on the ceiling, sunglasses, pale garments worn loose, afternoon naps, lemons, ice; the whole idea of climate strikes you; you’re going to be someone slightly different here; it’s the birth of your tropical twin; a twinge of pity for the self who lived so long in the cold.

  Eleven

  Thick socks: worn indoors, after a bath or a bruising day at work; you’re hardly ever nice to your feet or ankles – they’ve been promoted; the toes are free yet cosy; it helps with everything – you respond patiently to an inconvenient request, you listen more carefully when your partner tells you something; you feel sensual without the inconvenient clamour of sexual desire; they were on sale at GBP 4.99; so much for so little.

  Twelve

  Being offered the kind of biscuit you liked as a child: it’s been years, you only had them when you were quite little; one time you went into the kitchen very early in the morning and took a handful back to bed with you; you liked to pull them apart and eat them from the inside out; you liked licking them, you could eat them just with a million licks; you take a nibble; it’s not as nice as you’d remembered, your palate has changed; but you liked the little you who liked them so much; you wish you could give them one now.

  Thirteen

  Building sites: it’s messy, but everything has a very definite purpose and reason for being there; they are the ingredients of an extension or a new block of flats; the pile of bricks will eventually be sorted into a wall against which one day a chemical engineer will place a prized side table bargained for proudly in halting French in a flea market in Bordeaux; the machines are so carefully contrived, the different scoop heads for gouging trenches; the pools of muddy clay will be landscaped away; people will welcome their friends at a door that’s currently on order from a supplier in Wolverhampton; it looks like chaos now, but the builders have been through this a million times, and they can already clearly see the end.

  Fourteen

  After exercise: tough when you were doing it; now you’re the virtuous person who has just exercised; the pleasing ache in the limbs to prove your efforts were real; it seems so logical – you suffer and the outcome is good; the will demands and the body obeys, eventually; we’re glimpsing the ideal structure of the rest of life.

  Fifteen

  Intelligent eyes: it’s such a big, nebulous concept – intelligence takes so many forms; at its best, it’s wisdom – the ability to understand other people and oneself; you see it in the way they hold your gaze when you get to a tricky moment; how they narrow in accurate scepticism or glint with sympathy when others feel awkward; the desire to be like that.

  Sixteen

  Lying in a field, looking up: the sky is so far away; a cloud drifts by; how come one never looked properly at the sky before: you can’t see where it starts; so beautiful, always there; the normal preoccupations fade; you’re no longer an employee, a rate payer, a swing voter, a moderately frustrated lover – you are a child of the universe, a sky gazer, an essential human being undefined; you could look at it forever, except there’s a pebble between your shoulder blades and a beetle crawling inside your collar.

  Seventeen

  A brief burst of righteous anger: the energy, the sudden confidence; you turn on them; normally you try to be peaceable, see the
other person’s point of view – but sometimes fury works; you’re accessing a usually dormant part of the psyche; nice to know you can; it gives dignity to your niceness; you’re not polite out of weakness but out of knowledge of your strength; you mostly velvet your paws because you have sharp claws; good that others understand this too.

  Eighteen

  Rediscovering a nice side of a friend/lover: we’ve known them so well and so long; the irritants start to predominate; then they do or say something that reminds you so much why you loved them in the first place; the way they overuse a word, a flick of the hair they don’t realise they do; a detail uncovers a lost, very charming part of who they are; and the tenderness comes flooding back; why did we ever forget; can we keep hold of it from now on?

  Nineteen

  Getting the giggles in adulthood: half a laugh, half sheer delight at the glorious, unthreatening absurdity of life; you giggled your way through being 9 (thanks to Aditya and Jennifer); there was that time when you were 14 and nearly fell off your stool in the chemistry lab, you could hardly hold it in; doesn’t happen so much these days (absurdity doesn’t usually strike you as charming); lovely when it happens; it means: people are nuts and I don’t mind; wisdom breaking through.

  Twenty

  Understanding a new bit of yourself: you assumed you knew yourself; your hopes and fears seemed constant unchangeable companions; maybe the circumstances are shifting – you’re in a new place, a new job, with someone a bit different, learning a new language – and you realise there’s more to you than you’d thought; can be disconcerting at first – how is this going to fit with the rest of what’s there; and then the open question: if this is me, what else might I find if I learn how to look?

  Twenty-one