on taking one's dessert first
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!
