When we were children we used to "happen in" to the kitchen just before
luncheon to see what the dessert was to be. This was because at the
luncheon table we were not allowed to ask, yet it was advantageous to
know, for since even our youthful capacity had its limits, we found it
necessary to "save room," and the question, of course, was, how much
room?
Discovering some favorite dish being prepared, we used to gaze with
watering mouth, and, though knowing its futility, could seldom repress
the plea, "Mayn't we have our dessert now?" Of course we never did, of
course we waited, and of course, when that same dessert came to us,
properly served, at the proper time, after a properly wholesome luncheon
preceding, it found us expectant, perhaps, but not eager; appreciative,
but not enthusiastic. It was not to us what it would have been at the
golden moment when we begged for it.
In hours of unbridled hostility to domestic conditions we used sometimes
to plan for a future when we should be grown up, and then would we not
change this sorry scheme of things entire! Would we not have a larder,
with desserts in it, our favorite desserts--and would we not devour
these same, boldly, recklessly, immediately before the meal for which
they were intended! Just wouldn't we!
And afterward--just didn't we! Most youthful fancies are doomed to fade
unrealized, but this one was too fundamentally practical and sane. We
are grown up, we have a larder, with now and then toothsome desserts in
it, and now and then we grip our conscience till it cowers and is still,
we wait till the servants are out, we walk into our pantry--and then--
Yes, triumphant we still believe what once militant we maintained--that
the only way to eat cake is when it is just out of the oven, that the
only way to eat ice cream is to dip it out of the freezer, down under
the apple tree, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. Afterward, when it
appears in sober decorum, surrounded by all the appurtenances of
civilization, it is a very commonplace affair; out under the apple tree
it is ambrosia.
Why not go further? Why not take all our desserts in life when they
taste best, instead of at the proper time, when we don't care for them?
Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be enjoyed. Why not have them when
most enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain perverted
conscientiousness that leads us to this enforcement of our pleasures. I
am myself conscious that I can scarcely ever approach a pleasure with a
mind singly bent on enjoyment. I regard it with something like
suspicion, I hedge, I hesitate, I defer. What is the motive force here?
Is it an inherited asceticism, bidding us beware of pleasure as such? Is
it pride, which will not permit us to make unseemly haste toward our
desires? Is it a subtle self-gratification, which seeks to add zest,
tone, to our delights by postponing them? Is it fear of anticlimax,
which makes us save our pleasure for the last thing, that there may be
no descent afterward? Certainly the last was the motive in the case of
the little boy who, dining out, was given a piece of mince and one of
custard pie. He liked the mince best, therefore he saved it until the
last, and had just conscientiously finished the custard when his beaming
hostess said: "Oh, you like the custard best! Well, dear, you needn't
eat the other. Delia, bring another plate for Henry and I'll give him
another piece of the custard pie." Pathetic! Yet I confess my sympathy
with Henry has always been qualified by disapproval of his methods,
which, it seems to me, brought down upon him an awful but not wholly
undeserved penalty.
The incident is worth careful attention. For life, I believe, is
continually treating us as that benevolent but misguided hostess treated
the incomprehensible Henry. If we postpone our mince pie, it is often
snatched from us and we never get it at all. I knew a youth once who
habitually rode a bicycle that was too small for him. He explained that
he continued to do this because then, when at some future time he did
have one that fitted him, he would be so surpassingly comfortable! Soon
after, bicycles went out of fashion, and I fear the moment of supreme
luxury never came. His mince pie had, as it were, been snatched from
him. One of my friends wrote me once: "It seems to me I am always
distractingly busy just getting ready to live, but I never really
begin." Most of us are in the same plight. We are like the thrifty
housewife who kept pushing the week's work earlier and earlier, until it
backed up into the week before; yet with all her planning she never
succeeded in clearing one little spot of leisure for herself. She never
got her dessert at all. Probably she would not have enjoyed it if she
had had it. For the capacity to enjoy desserts in life is something not
to be trifled with. Children have it, and grown people can keep it if
they try, but they don't always try. I knew of a man who worked every
minute until he was sixty, getting rich. He did get rich. Then he
retired; he built him a "stately pleasure palace" and set about taking
his pleasure. And lo! he found that he had forgotten how! He tried this
and that, indoor and outdoor pleasures, the social and the solitary,
the artistic and the semi-scientific--all to no purpose. Here were all
the desserts that throughout his life he had been steadfastly pushing
aside; they were ranged before him to partake of, and when he would
partake he could not. And so he left his pleasure palace and went back
to "business."
We are not all so far gone as this, but few of us have the courage to
take our desserts when they are offered, or the free spirit to enjoy
them to the uttermost. I get up on a glorious summer morning and gaze
out at the new day. With all the strongest and deepest instincts of my
nature I long to go out into the green beauty of the world, to fling
myself down in some sloping meadow and feel the sunshine envelop me and
the warm winds pass over me, to see them tossing the grasses and tugging
at the trees and driving the white clouds across the blue, and to feel
the great earth revolving under me--for if you lie long enough you can
really get the sense of sailing through space. All this I long for--from
my window. Then I turn back to my unglorified little house--little,
however big, compared with the limitless world of beauty outside--and
betake myself to my day's routine occupations. I read my mail, I answer
letters, I go over accounts, I fly to the telephone and give orders and
make engagements. And at length, after hours of such stultifying
employment, I elect to call myself "free," and go forth to enjoy my
"well-earned" leisure. Fool that I am! As if enjoyment were a thing to
be taken up and laid down at will, like a walking-stick. As if one could
let the golden moment pass and hope to find it again awaiting our
convenience. Why can we not be like Pippa with her one precious day? But
if she had been born in New England do you suppose her day would have
been what it was? Would she have sprung up at daybreak with heart and
mind all alight for pleasure? Certainly not. She would have spent the
golden morning in cleaning the kitchen, and the golden afternoon in
clearing up the attic, and would have gone out for a little walk after
the supper dishes were washed, only because she thought she "ought" to
take a little exercise in the open air.
Duty and work are all very well, but we have bound ourselves up in them
so completely that we have almost lost the art of spontaneous
enjoyment. We can feel comfortable or uncomfortable, annoyed or
gratified, but we cannot feel simple, buoyant, instinctive enjoyment in
anything. We take our very pleasures under the name of duties-- "We
ought to take a walk," "We ought not to miss that concert," "We ought to
read" a certain book, "We ought" to go and see this friend, or invite
that one to see us. Those things that should be our spontaneous
pleasures we have clothed and masked until they no longer know
themselves. A pleasure must present itself under the guise of a duty
before we feel that we can wholly give ourselves over to it.
Ah, let us stop all that! Let us take our pleasures without apology. Let
us give up this fashion of shoving them away into the left-over corners
of our lives, covering their gleaming raiment with sad-colored robes,
and visiting them with half-averted faces. Let us consort with them
openly, gayly!