Minor Delights

IF there is anything which the average human being takes for granted, it is that he knows what he wants, and for a good part of his life it is this naïve assumption which makes about three quarters of his trouble. Nothing is less to be taken for granted. Such knowledge only comes as one of the last stages of culture, and when it comes we are just about ready for translation to another Scene, better arranged than this for the satisfying of our desires. A great deal of prayer has doubtless been of small avail in this world, because the prayerful person quite overran that petition which our constitution is always trying to work in if possible, namely, the request that we might know with some degree of clearness what it is we really want.

I am disposed to think that our excessive dogmatism with regard to our pleasures has kept us from getting anywhere near the truth about them, and that it is only here and there that some emancipated soul is able to give any veracious account of his happiness. Most of us know very little about what gives us pleasure. The good Lord lets us go on supposing it is this or that which makes us happy, while he sees to it surreptitiously that we are made happy in a thousand little ways which he does not dare reveal to us, for fear we should despise them if we knew.

Almost anybody feels quite equal to discussing the question of happiness, but the real question is not whether we can be happy, but whether we shall be allowed to know what it is that makes us so. It is to be feared that if we actually knew what our real delights are, we should have supreme contempt for them. They are freely given to all of us, but mercifully hidden from most.

It is only in illuminated, anonymous moments, such as these columns provide for, that I dare own up to myself the sort of things that put me in fine fettle. If any one had asked me point blank what I enjoyed most, I should have lied in a highly orthodox manner about music and poetry and automobiling and golf and doing good to others, and having more money. But when I catechise myself relentlessly about what I should do if I had absolute financial freedom, I know that the first thing I should do would be to buy five dollars’ worth of postage stamps.

I once visited the lake-shore residence of a railroad magnate. I surveyed his art treasures, and rejoiced in his commanding view; but when we came away at night, and were talking over the day, Helen said, with rapture, “But did you see that whole sheet of postage stamps in the library drawer ?" Did I? It had filled my soul with such a sense of affluence and true liberty as I know not how to describe, and to this hour the most immediate joy I can think of in being a millionaire would be the absolute, indisputable right to buy five dollars’ worth of stamps without feeling wicked about it.

The joys of a more ample living I had long and often pictured to myself. Many sizable and conventional pleasures had I classified amongst them, but what remains to me as the delight that pinched most upon my accession to a larger competence was that of buying, for the first time in my life, a box of pens. Truly to him that hath shall be given, for the very next week after taking this plunge into plutocracy, a banker friend of mine gave me a box. But about nothing have I ever been so enabled to sympathize with the mood of the gentleman who said, “Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years,” as about that box of pens. Of course, I bought many new books, but that was to be expected. The pens remain as the great subconscious happiness which ran as an undertone through that first year of comparative riches.

Do not laugh at me, but a smooth-running pen and a fresh blotter will often send through my soul such a sense of well-being and harmony with the universe as some kinds of religion are powerless to bestow. How often have I thought it was all up with me mentally, that nothing but a psychological revolution would ever make me a living soul again, or bring joy back to my heart, when I have found that a fresh pen would set me off like a house on fire. But never have I dared to confess it, except in the strictest anonymity. My conventional wants are as large as anybody’s, but as a matter of fact, I can always be coaxed back into happiness, and a fair degree of usefulness, by fresh pens and clean blotters.

My great pleasures have been mostly failures. Of course, I still talk about them in company as if they had been all that could be desired, but as soon as the company go I forget them. By a great pleasure I mean, for example, a gift of one hundred dollars. Twice in my life, yea, three times, have I run into this experience, which off-hand I should have said would be a pronounced success in the way of pleasures. I told myself dogmatically that I must be happy, but before noon I had listed up five hundred dollars’ worth of luxuries, which by dinner-time had passed over into the gray and uninteresting region of necessities, and I went to bed at last with an entirely new consciousness of poverty. It is rarely that these experiences come back to me now as among my cherished memories. Far be it from me to ward off any one proposing to try me again with such a gift, for I should strive to meet it manfully even to the end, but in a moment of sanity I here put on record that I am not over-sanguine about the results of it.

I have known a morning of gloom which refused to budge at the most stalwart lecturing I could give myself upon the art of living, only to find, after some hours, that for quite a while a strange childlike happiness had been pervading my whole being, as if there had been imparted to me a touch of that “ unaccountable friendliness in all things" which Thoreau once experienced in a rainstorm. I traced the genealogy of that quick rapture, straight back without a break, to nothing else than the glow of a common bottle of blue ink, as the light struck it just right on the corner of my bookcase. With such opportunities as I have had for large sensations, I am not a little chagrined to have to confess that most of my happiness has come from minor delights.

But on no subject do I look for less frank and reliable information than on the subject of what people like best to read. I happen to know of a book-buyer, who is free to lay his hand upon priceless literary treasures. If he were asked about his chief literary pleasure, we should doubtless hear some proper and improving words about Milton or Dante. But this is a subject on which few people can be believed, unless they swear they are lying; for, through well-authenticated inside reports, it has been brought to me that whenever the great connoisseur gets any time for reading, the pleasure to which he almost infallibly gravitates is the perusal of old reports of the Episcopal General Convention. But this is manifestly not a relish to be spoken of in public. A man who owns first editions of almost everything, and an edition “de looks ” of everything he does not care for, has duties toward them not to be lightly disregarded.

Truly our happinesses are a science which demands of us, if we are to know it expertly, that we divest ourselves of prepossessions and dogmatism, and refrain from saying what ought to make us happy. We shall have to buckle down to the laboratory method, or the study of cases, and be content to find out what it is that really does delight us. When the light of that science shall have begun to shine widely upon our affairs, one trusts that there will hardly be a literary club left, while afternoon teas will unobtrusively depart from the field they should never have tried to occupy.