The Hidden Pleasures of Life Read online




  The Hidden Pleasures of Life

  Theodore Zeldin

  A New Way of Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  By the same author

  Dedication

  Preface

  1 What is the great adventure of our time?

  2 What is a wasted life?

  3 How can people lose their illusions about themselves?

  4 What alternatives are there to being a rebel?

  5 What can the poor tell the rich?

  6 What could the rich tell the poor?

  7 How many ways of committing suicide are there?

  8 How can an unbeliever understand a believer?

  9 How can a religion change?

  10 How can prejudices be overcome?

  11 How else can one think about the future, apart from trying to predict it or worrying about it?

  12 Is ridicule the most effective form of non-violent protest?

  13 How does one acquire a sense of humour?

  14 What stops people feeling completely at home in their own country?

  15 How many nations can one love at the same time?

  16 Why do so many people feel unappreciated, unloved and only half alive?

  17 How else might women and men treat one another?

  18 What can replace the shortage of soul-mates?

  19 Is another kind of sexual revolution achievable?

  20 What can artists aim for beyond self-expression?

  21 What is more interesting than becoming a leader?

  22 What is the point of working so hard?

  23 Are there more amusing ways of earning a living?

  24 What else can one do in a hotel?

  25 What more can the young ask of their elders?

  26 Is remaining young at heart enough to avoid becoming old?

  27 What is worth knowing?

  28 What does it mean to be alive?

  Where can one find nourishment for the mind?

  First published in Great Britain in 2015 by

  MacLehose Press

  An imprint of Quercus Publishing Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  Copyright © Theodore Zeldin, 2015

  The moral right of Theodore Zeldin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 0 85705 367 1

  Print ISBN 978 0 85705 368 8

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  By the same author

  Conversation

  An Intimate History of Humanity

  Happiness

  The French

  A History of French Passions

  in five volumes:

  Ambition and Love

  Intellect and Pride

  Taste and Corruption

  Politics and Anger

  Anxiety and Hypocrisy

  Emile Ollivier and the Liberal Empire

  The Political System of Napoleon III

  Etc.

  To Deirdre Wilson

  Preface

  FIGHT FOR YOUR RIGHTS! PROTEST! Ignore the horrors around you, amuse yourself, be happy! Make money, work hard, win power! Hide your wrinkles! Are these and their likes the only weapons with which we can defend ourselves against the cruelties of life? Humanity is no longer what it was when these now ancient forms of protection were invented. We know more than we ever did, and have suffered more disappointments than we can remember. We are now free to extricate ourselves from reliance on corrupted versions of ideals that once seemed to radiate only beauty and hope. So I have set out to find others, hidden, unspoken or forgotten, by approaching the history of human experience from a personal angle.

  Each of my chapters begins with the voice of a person from a different epoch and civilisation confronting one of the big decisions that everyone has to make, and responding with a story of their own experience. This draws me into a conversation in which I ask what other answers might be available today, what opportunities were missed in the past, and what possibilities have opened up since then. The characters in this book are not heroes to emulate. I have chosen them partly because they have left particularly frank personal testimonies, suggesting that it is sometimes easier to get to know more about the dead – when their private secrets are revealed – than the living – who take so much care to conceal theirs – and partly because they have inspired me with unexpected thoughts about what humans could attempt in the future. They have stimulated me to search in new directions for what life can contain, to become aware of what I have missed, and to distinguish between what humans are and the labels they stick on themselves. History is not just a record of what happened and why it happened, but above all a provocation of the imagination.

  I begin by investigating the untried options individuals have when they feel powerless, or isolated, or not valued at their true worth, or frustrated that civilisation’s arrangements do not suit them. I explore neglected paths that cross the boundaries erected by money, prejudice, pretence and misunderstanding, I focus on what happens when two strangers meet, expanding the notion of the couple to include not only people who fall in and out of love, or live together, but also ‘couples of the mind’, who form independently of physical union, time or place. Curiosity can generate a desire as powerful and insistent as the desire of the body. Ideas can forge long-lasting bonds, even if these are fashioned out of illusions about oneself or about others (chapters 1–7).

  Next, I meet people as they appear when they belong to large groups, to a nation or a religion (chapters 8–16). The deeper I go into the history of how these groups became what they are, very different from how they started, the more I realise that the seemingly formidable barriers around each one are less immovable than they appear. Numerous uncertainties are hidden beneath the surface of the metaphors they use to differentiate themselves and the slogans that conceal internal conflicts or distract from abandoned ideals. Is it inevitable that people should repeatedly forget that, in retrospect, they regret the violence to which their passionate loyalties lead? Why has pleasure in laughing at human follies achieved so little in preventing them? In the history of the relations between men and women (chapters 17–19) I find pointers to how stultifying habits might slowly be dissolved.

  Then I confront the great puzzle of why so many individuals spend such a large proportion of their waking hours in boring, futile and sometimes servile employment, why there are not enough worthwhile and life-enhancing jobs to suit the talents of new generations, and why there is often more disillusionment, more betrayal, more back-stabbing at work than in families (chapters 20–25). My adventures inside corporations and governments have impressed upon me how difficult it is for them to change, but also suggest they could be different. The original meaning of the word ‘business’ was anxiety, distress, officiousness, difficulty. So I investigate the possibility
that business could find a new meaning again, and a more exhilarating philosophy. The triumphs of technology and medicine have been achieved by endless experimentation, ‘research and development’, so I show how professions and firms could each have, side by side with their existing practices, the equivalent of a laboratory to try out, on a small scale, different possible ways of reinventing themselves, to fulfil a wider range of present-day aspirations.

  My final chapters (26–28) are about the art of reflecting on the passing of time. I find it is even possible to see the process of ageing and the prospect of dying in a less blinding light.

  How then could human energies begin to be divided differently between sexual intercourse, commercial intercourse and verbal intercourse? The mistrust and misunderstanding that plague people’s lives have often been resolved by intimate, face-to-face conversations, but many conversations are trivial, or hurried, or monologues, or human versions of birdsong without the beauty, endlessly repeating the same refrain to the same narrow circle. A book is an invitation to engage in a silent conversation with an author and the characters in his book, at a rhythm that suits the reader. This book is not a thriller designed to make it impossible for you to put it down; on the contrary, it invites you to pause and reflect after each chapter, and start your own conversation about it. I should like to know what you can see and understand that I cannot. If, as a result, we say what we have not said before, we might be able to think about the future more fruitfully.

  However, Thomas Edison put this warning on the door of his laboratory: ‘There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labour of thinking.’ A wit replied: ‘Well, why should a man think when Mr. Edison reaches conclusions for him? Personally, we’d resort to any amount of thinking to avoid real labour.’ I prefer to regard thinking as a sociable activity. Bringing ideas and people from separate domains together is one of the main ways in which thinking develops and discoveries are made. Finding unsuspected links between dissimilar individuals, between apparently incompatible opinions, and between the past and the present is one of the first steps on the path to hidden pleasures. It is sometimes salutary to see the world not only in bright and contrasting colours, but also in sepia, with the frontiers blurred by unexpected commonalities.

  [1]

  What is the great adventure of our time?

  IN 1859, AT THE AGE OF twenty-three, an Iranian student walked out of his home in Sultanabad because he was unwilling to get married. His parents were pressuring him to, but settling down while still young, he said, would mean that ‘I would spend all my life in the same place and would not learn anything about the world.’ Taking only three loaves of bread with him, and wearing only summer clothes, he walked northwards, not quite sure where he was heading. Eventually he reached Russia. He kept on walking and travelling for eighteen years through most of the countries of Europe, the U.S., Japan, China, India and Egypt. He joined the pilgrimage to Mecca nine times. ‘No handicap in the world is worse than ignorance,’ he wrote in his diary.

  There may be backpackers who have journeyed as far, but who among them has learned the language of almost every country visited, as Hajj Sayyah did, and earned his keep as a translator? Though he had no money, no letters of recommendation, no influential family behind him, he obtained audiences with the Tsar of Russia, the Pope, the Kings of Greece and Belgium, Bismarck, Garibaldi, and repeatedly met President Ulysses Grant in the U.S.A. He was the first Iranian to become an American citizen. He demonstrated what gentleness, politeness and unpretentiousness could achieve. He was welcomed everywhere. Only once was he assaulted, in Naples. Only once was he insulted, by the Ottoman consul there who said, ‘He is an Iranian; how can we believe him?’ But the consul later apologised, when he got to know him better. Even the pickpockets of Naples befriended him, and gave him free lodging in the house where they trained novice pickpockets. He bore no grudges, only asking himself: ‘How could there be such extreme differences among mankind? How could man be mean to such a degree, or on the contrary so noble?’

  His insatiable curiosity took him not just to the museums of every city, but to its schools, libraries, churches, factories, botanical gardens, zoos, prisons, theatres. When asked who he was, he would reply, ‘A creature of God and a stranger to this city.’ His favourite proverb was: ‘Keep secret your wealth, your destination and your religion.’ He delighted in being ‘a common man’, able to discover how uncommon every common man was. ‘If I were a king, I would never see things that way, because kings cannot be in the society of the poor. The purpose of the king is to show his appearance to the people, but the purpose of the poor is to see the people the way they are. They move about freely without fear. Nobody notices them, but they see everything and everybody.’

  People were so kind to him and invited him to their homes, to the theatre, and to join them on their outings, because they reciprocated his interest in them. Not that he approved of everything. He openly criticised the manufacture of arms when he met the King of Belgium. He recorded the bitter complaints he heard about poverty and oppression. But in Paris he wrote, ‘People here enjoy liberty. They freely say what they want. No-one interferes in other people’s business . . . Sorrow makes life short. These people have no sorrow, they should never die.’

  When he finally returned to Iran, he entered the quite different adventure of politics, the search for political solutions to humanity’s ills. Protesting against the ‘undeserved hardships and atrocities which were beyond the endurance of beasts, let alone men, inflicted on poor, hapless and ignorant Persian subjects like myself’, he joined the movement against corruption and misgovernment that led to his country’s revolution of 1905. He was active in the most influential secret society plotting change, was sent to prison and rural exile, and, when his life seemed to be in danger, he took refuge for five months in the American embassy. After the revolution, widely admired for his wisdom and humility, he was called the Secret Harbinger of the Humanist Movement. The Persian word translated as ‘humanist’ is ‘Adamiyat’. Hajj Sayyah was a protagonist of the ‘fellowship of humanity’ (ashab-e adamiyat). But politics proved to be too full of rivalries and animosities to achieve his ideals, and it still has not achieved them. On the other hand, backpackers usually seek only a temporary solution, postponing the day when the straitjacket that rigid institutions favour has to be donned. What other path then is there to take?

  Hajj Sayyah’s eighteen-year journey was an adventure, the opposite of a career. He differed from adventurers like Cortez – in search of a kingdom, using traditional weapons, force and guile – or Columbus – greedy for the fabled gold of India. He had nothing in common with the pirates and courtesans, the mercenary soldiers or the Californian gold-diggers who used to be the archetypal adventurers, nor with the French Academy’s 1823 definition of the adventurer as a person without fortune or status who lives by intrigue. Only in recent times has being called an adventurer ceased to be an insult, suggesting instead an idealistic person searching for what society does not offer; but this has often meant only a vague longing for the exotic, for new sensations or for primitive simplicity, or a contempt for worldly ambitions, even rejecting all ambition, following the poet Rimbaud’s maxim that ‘goals are inane’. The spirit of adventure could be interpreted as an escape, or a purely personal achievement, or a triumph of technology, like the journey to the moon.

  Almost exactly a century after Hajj Sayyah embarked on his long journey, Simon Murray, a nineteen-year-old Briton, jilted by his girl-friend and bored by his job in a Manchester iron foundry, walked away and joined the French Foreign Legion. He wanted to prove to himself that he deserved a better destiny, that he had the strength to survive the extremes of cruelty and war. Self-confidence was his reward. He wrote a book, with remarkable literary skill, about how he overcame the cruelties and dangers of the desert, which was so gripping that it was made into a film. Then he went into business, became head of huge corporations and grew very rich. However
, that was not enough for him. In his sixties, he repeated his youthful act of defiance by walking alone to the Antarctic. But his adventures were in the tradition of doing things because they were difficult and challenging. They were a supplement to life, like sport, an escape from the ordinariness of life, but they did not change life. They were important to him, but for others ordinary life continues as before. Other kinds of adventure are possible.

  If you and I had met in the sixteenth century, I would have said to you: The great adventure of our time is to discover new continents and new oceans. Let us stop grumbling about our discontents and seek a more exhilarating purpose. Come to America. And after that, let us explore the whole world. We cannot think we have really lived until we have seen the full extent of humanity’s home.

  A century later, I would have said to you, the great adventure of our time is science. It is going to reveal that behind what we can see and touch and hear, there is an even more amazing world. No object is what it appears to be. Let us discover the secrets of nature: they promise to be much more amazing than the fantasies of magic.

  In the eighteenth century, a wonderful adventure held out the promise of a completely new era of equality. Come and join in the struggle against public and private tyrannies. Let us overthrow despots and proclaim freedom for everybody. Let us ensure that each and every person has the right to aim for every kind of achievement, however poor their parents were.

  There are also adventures that have existed since the beginning of time. One is the search for purpose and a less self-centred existence, which is what religions and ideologies teach. Another, just as ancient but neglected until its recent revival, involves finding ways of living harmoniously with all the earth’s creatures and plants, the sea and the landscape, as they constantly renew themselves. A third is the quest for beauty, and its appreciation in many forms, to reveal that the imagination has no limits.