The pleasures of being alone
Though he loves his family and enjoys them immensely he loves being alone. And even if it is only for the few short minutes before his first class of the day, he will look up from his cappuccino and croissant, up into the blue sky, up into the dark blue green trees, feel the brisk cool breeze blowing all about him, and once again, enjoy the pure pleasure of being by himself, his own solitary thoughts. What would he think about? Nothing.
It is enough for him to feel the breeze all over him. Thought comes in always without summons. He suspects we are engulfed in an ocean of it. They come into us through any hole, any orifice, any window left unclosed about our minds. He writes two essays every week. And he never really prefigures too much what to write and where the words come from. They come to him.
They come to him just like the wind now blowing into the back of his neck and armpits. They make him feel good the same way words make him feel good. Words, after all, are only containers of thought. One word, enough to contain a thought. Two words, an idea in the form of a phrase. More than that, a point. And as all points always require a connection to another, in due course the point joins with another and another and another and becomes a line in space acquiring a momentum of its own.
The story is only a line in space. It starts for us at the upper left hand portion of the page. It ends somewhere below that. And since line is the most fundamental part of form, as form may be understood in the visual arts, then we may judge whether a line is aesthetic or not. It is easy to decide. You do not have to be a writer or an artist to do this. You need only to read the line and as you do this, do you the pleasure of it? Some call this pleasure the “beauty feeling”. It is something worth thinking about since most people now read for information rather than for anything else. It is their loss.
Information is already everywhere. They bombard us wherever we are. If he were really curious, he could google from where he sat a recipe for the croissant and the cappuccino in front of him. But he would rather keep that a mystery. All the better to relish their taste.
He had been told croissants are bad for you since they are made by repeatedly flattening the dough each time applying a layer of butter. It is allegedly loaded with transfats. This information does not contribute to the pleasure of eating it. But it does warn him against ordering a second. On the other hand, the smell of other croissants baking in the oven as he eats his day’s ration puts inside him a sense of wellbeing. So also the crispness of the bread crust, its lightness, the subtle salty fat of it.
These things, he does not think about as he bites and then rolls the morsel inside his mouth. His mouth needs no instructions, the bread, no mediation. It knows exactly what to do with such an unsubtle and simple problem as taste. He enjoys his croissant without thinking and yet it fills up something inside his mind. A croissant is just like words. They are both only food.
There are croissants and then there are croissants. There are words and then again, there are words. All are wonderful, and yet there are words more beautiful than others. Especially when they are layered and rolled out just so with a thin coating of butter.
And if the words are there only to fill out the few minutes of the morning before work actually begins then it is most likely the words would be good to countenance and put into the mouth just for the pleasure of it instead of as something to fill our hunger for information. We will have our fill of that before the day is out.
Just as we will be filled with the problems of the world, dealing with people, dealing with little children, teaching them theory, teaching skills, teaching life, teaching them how to make bread. These few moments with a croissant and a cappuccino are wonderful not because they are necessary. They are wonderful for the polar opposite of that. They are not necessary. They are not required. They are his and his alone.
