The Book of the Courtesans by Susan Griffin

Author:Susan Griffin
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780767910828
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2002-02-05T16:00:00+00:00

MARION DAVIES

Chapter Five

Gaiety (or Joie de Vivre)

Kiss the joy as it flies.

—WILLIAM BLAKE

THE CAPACITY TO take pleasure in life is no less a virtue than any other. Joy is not as simple as it appears. There are those who, whether out of fear or judgment, so habitually resist the feeling that after a while they lose the knack of being pleased altogether. Others, mistaking mastery for pleasure, prefer conquest to delight and never really taste the spoils of their efforts. There is an art to enjoying life, to feeling desire and receiving what comes, to savoring every detail, down to the finest points, of each taste, sensation, or moment that happens by will or by chance to appear. The experience requires a subtle courage. Delight, jubilance, elation can throw you off balance, upsetting the established order of the day (or, as is more often the case, the night). And because almost all forms of joy are fleeting, pleasure must eventually lead to loss, no matter how small— a loss that brings with it the certain knowledge that everything passes.

Abstinence and greed alike provide the means to avoid this knowledge. By shunning pleasure, the loss of it can be avoided. Aesop’s fable of the Ant and the Cricket is one of the more abiding stories regarding abstinence we have been given. It is a cautionary tale that warns us against the fate of the hungry cricket, who sang and danced all summer rather than gathering food as the ant did. Yet, read closely, the story conceals another warning, too. The abstemious ant lacks generosity. When the cricket asks for food from his industrious neighbor, the ant sardonically suggests that he just keep dancing. There is more than a little jealousy in this response, though in retrospect we can feel some sympathy for him. All summer his attention has been on the winter. But the sight of the cricket must have reminded the poor ant how little he enjoyed the summer.

Aesop himself was not immune to enjoyment. Centuries ago, he supported the courtesan Rhodopsis. And La Fontaine, the man who, in the seventeenth century, transformed Aesop’s tales into French poetry, was present more than once when Ninon entertained her guests by playing the lute. He must have been transfixed like everyone else. Despite the moral of the tale, his appreciation of music is evident in the beautiful rhymes and rhythms of his telling.

Of course, the story is correct in one sense. The existence of greed alone tells us that the indulgence of pleasure does not always lead to a pleasing end. Yet, though greed seems to be going in the opposite direction to abstinence, it springs from a similar motive. The accumulation of whatever is pleasurable in far greater quantities than can actually be enjoyed creates the illusion that one has escaped the transitory nature of pleasure. The rub is that, as with a gluttony so exaggerated it causes illness, pleasure itself will be sacrificed in the bargain. What is crucial is the intent.

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