Greetings, pleasure-seekers!* My regular Sunday dispatch has staggered lately, for which we can blame the creature in my house that my husband likes to call Pocket Hercules (tiny yet mighty), who is six weeks old today. Thus I’m sending this out on [checks notes, re-checks, gives up] Thursday? But I’m aiming for more regularity. It feels important right now to have something to distinguish days from each other, night from morning, up from down—even if that just means being diligent about opening and closing the curtains with morning and night, letting fresh air blow through our rooms and brains. Clawing at sunshine through glass.
Inevitably, I’ve been questioning what it means to share joys and pleasures just now, how this philosophy of mine, such as it is, survives scary or joyless times. At its simplest, pleasure can be a distraction, a way of marking time, or wasting it—which is why it so often makes us feel guilty, especially when it’s a solitary or private thing. Now, though, it feels as though it’s the sharing that matters, more than the thing itself. This is reflected all over social media, amid the news and panic: virtual movie-watching parties, classes, performances, hangouts—all these efforts to recreate the collective experience of culture at a distance. I hope we continue to integrate these virtual events into our (fingers crossed) IRL future, letting people celebrate in spite of the hurdles of geography or mobility.
I share things I’ve been enjoying in this space all the time, but it’s never felt harder to communicate the specificity of my enjoyment through a title or a link or a list by itself. I don’t just want to point to the map, I want to unearth the treasure together. I’m not sure what this would look like, but I’m thinking about it. An idea, a kind of gathering, that might lie somewhere between (a) this LRB article about the pleasure of re-reading Jane Austen, and of close reading in general (reflecting how I was trained as a literary scholar, and expressing the specific nerdy joy of noticing something you missed the first time around) and (b) this lovely, unabashedly sentimental celebration of gathering, of community, of the physical presence of other people.
Until soon.
* Yes, no? Probably no.