I am lying in the bath on an unhurried morning reading a poetry anthology. It is a good bath; it is a good anthology too but I’m not in the mood and my arms are tense from holding up the book. I put it on the floor, let my hands and arms subside, and think of ‘the Great Pleasure of resting one’s hands in warm water.’ [Footnote: people in old British films are always resting their hands in warm water. When I was young, grown-ups used to sit bathing their weary feet too. If no-one does this now, is it the shoes or the society that’s changed?]
On the edge of the bath is a box-set of slender Penguin paperbacks. GREAT IDEAS it proclaims in great red capitals, and there they all are, busy and brilliant – Augustine, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and the rest – looking at the world (by which they mostly mean human society) and telling us why it is and how it could be better (for which, at this stage of my book, I can hardly condemn them). Of them all I suspect only Montaigne, and perhaps Virginia Woolf, would appreciate that ‘the Great Pleasure of resting one’s hands in warm water’ is as GREAT an IDEA as Communism, the Social Contract or Psychoanalysis – certainly a more enjoyable one. And much of its greatness lies in its smallness.
Such small données are the theme of the film Amélie. When she drops her perfume-bottle top and it dislodges a tile, Amélie finds M. Bretodeau’s childhood treasure box, hidden forty years before. The TV is blaring sensational news – Lady Diana killed in a car-crash! – but what is that to her? She switches it off irritably, knowing somehow that the treasure box is the important story, and devotes herself to reconnecting the grown-up Bretodeau with the child. She has chosen smallness over sensationalism, culture over acculturation, society as ‘congregation’ over society as ‘church’. She celebrates the world’s small and unexpected haecceities – skimming stones on the canal, the florist’s crinkly eyes, a horse joining a cycle race – and, in doing so, finds love and fulfilment along the way.
Such rewards are found rather than bought or wrested effortfully from the world – the bowl of hot-water rather than the foot-spa purchased in the self-indulgence boutique, the mountain rather than the ‘conquest’ of it, the rose which is more beautiful than the rosette it earned at the village show, the talents your idios daemon offers you – given by God, nature, chance, whatever, to which our response must be outward-looking gratitude and praise rather than self-congratulation; given, and so received without expectation, free of the quantitative prison-world where worth is calculated.
My fascination with details will I hope never cease. Every object is a miracle. (Jim Ede)
‘We are all very much aware of life, & seldom do anything we do not want to,’ writes Virginia Woolf somewhere in her diaries.
If, for a single moment, we read this as smug or self-indulgent; if, for a moment, we begin to say ‘Well, it’s all very well for her…’, it merely shows how far we have been conditioned by society to expect that our lives should be mirthless drudgery. We have not learnt such an attitude from nature: it may be indulgent to see merriment in the sparrows and blackbirds outside my window, or to divine blissful serenity in the cotoneaster they are thronging, but it would be at least as perverse to suppose they ‘grunt and sweat under a weary life’, the birds plucking berries with furrowed brows, the hedge growing slowly with Eeyore-ish resignation. Whatever their inner psychology, like Virginia Woolf they are ‘very much aware of life, & seldom do anything [they] do not want to’. The birds and bushes are simply being themselves, inevitably expressing their haecceities. And that is our privilege too even if, equipped by our more complex minds, we have a choice of not only our actions, but our attitude to our actions.
What Virginia Woolf was describing was, in fact, Ruskin’s ‘true life’, which, as he noted, was the life of the rest of nature too. Coleridge, though passionately interested and active in the politics of the day, could see that deeper truths lay elsewhere. In a letter to his brother, he wrote,
‘I have for some time past withdrawn myself almost totally from a consideration of immediate causes, [i.e. politics] which are infinitely complex and uncertain, to muse on fundamental and general causes … I devote myself … in poetry, to elevate the imagination and set the affections in right tone by the beauty of the inanimate impregnated, as with a living soul, by the presence of life … I love fields and woods & mountains with almost a visionary fondness – and because I have found benevolence & quietness growing within me as that fondness has increased, therefore I shall wish to be the means of implanting it in others.’
Which is another reason why I am writing this book. ‘A happiness there is’, and it is not most surely to be found in the fancies and entertainments we devise to stave off boredom, but in the ‘fields and woods & mountains’, and not even there because of their beauty, wondrous as it is, but because of their reality. As Auden says,
nothing is lovely
Not even in poetry, which is not the case.
Zum Erstaunen bin ich da – I am here to wonder. We are encouraged to see life as an opportunity to do things, a stage on which we can strut our stuff. Of course it isn’t. It’s not about us. The world is not fortunate to enjoy our presence; it has managed perfectly well without us. But we do have the opportunity to appreciate it, not as a bucket-list of exotica to be ticked off – that’s a quantitative, bureaucratic mentality – but here, now. It is a wonderful, and wonderfully ordinary, blessing.
It reminds me of Gene Kelly’s glorious expression of happiness dancing and Singin’ in the Rain, out in the urban elements, relishing the very ordinary blessings of downpipes, railings, lamp-posts (in a manner different from William James’s dog) puddles and rain. Society is not keen on the rain. Society is with the little guy who gladly grabs the umbrella, and with the cop who thinks Gene Kelly’s nuts and might need locking up. Indeed, the whole premise of the scene is that celebration is subversive, and that protecting oneself from reality is the proper way to behave. But Gene Kelly knows better.
And so too does Christopher Alexander:
‘in this mood, it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else; there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people around you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other people’s ridicule, no subtle train of fears which can connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and rain.’
Erfüll davon dein Herz, so gross es ist,
Und wenn du ganz in dem Gefühle selig bist,
Nenn es dann, wie du willst:
Nenns Glück! Herz! Liebe! Gott!
Ich habe keinen Namen
Dafür! Gefühl ist alles;
Name ist Schall unt Rauch,
Umnebelnd Himmelsglut.
Fill your heart full of this, big as it is,
And when the feeling inside you is complete delight,
Call it what you like:
Call it Happiness! Heart! Love! God!
I have no name for it!
Feeling is everything –
The name’s just sound and smoke,
Clouding the light of heaven.
Goethe, Faust
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