Asceticisms

     Have you noticed the rise in people, occupations, and organizations telling you to give up your pleasures?

     I’ve lived through campaigns against many things. You may remember some of them as well. Butter. Red meat. Sweets. Games. Alcoholic beverages. Carbonated beverages. Fiction. Television. Video entertainment generally. Sunbathing and suntans. Boisterous play. Sexual pleasure! Even smiles and laughter, in some grim religious sects.

     People who denounce things the rest of us enjoy have a long history. The reasons they’ve offered us vary, but the intent is constant: Give that up. You shouldn’t (or mustn’t). They can get very strident about it, such that the rest of us scurry off to find somewhere they’re not admitted.

     You’d swear that the ultimate enemy is human happiness. That just might be the case. There have always been some killjoys among us. But let’s be kind and stipulate that some of the campaigners sincerely want to help us.

     How much of that kind of help can you stand, Gentle Reader? My tolerance for it is limited. Still, there’s always some of it about.

     And this morning it’s very much on my mind.

* * *

     I have a love of sweet things. Some of those things are currently under a cloud of sorts. In the interests of my waistline, I do try to limit my intake, but I refuse to treat sweet goodies as the works of Satan. Despite having been told that sugar is metabolically deceptive and physiologically useless, I still eat a bite of dessert after dinner, most nights.

     I also enjoy wine. Really. A lot! And I have a couple of glasses of wine just about every evening. Got to wash the dessert down, don’t I? The C.S.O. and I enjoy it enough that we bought a tiny piece of a fine winery: Willamette Valley Vineyards in Oregon. And when we go for a brief vacation, we prefer to visit the Seneca Wine Trail, in New York’s Finger Lakes region. You can guess how we spend our time there.

     Well, just yesterday I went for my annual physical. According to my nurse-practitioner, whom I love dearly, I “shouldn’t” be eating sweets or drinking wine. Why? That went undiscussed, save for the usual “bad for you” implication. As I’m 74 years old and in near-perfect health, I smiled and changed the subject.

     There’s a doctor of some sort on X who’s been proclaiming that “Alcohol has not one benefit.” Clearly, he’d like us all to give up the consumption of alcoholic beverages. (I’m against that; it would bankrupt our winery.) No, he’s not the first. But what stands out here is his rationale: no benefits. Were he to be more explicit, he’d say no physiological benefit. And he might be right. But what about the non-physiological benefits? The lowering of stress, the improvement of mood, the improvement to conviviality? What about the enjoyment?

     Don’t those things matter?

* * *

     A passage in Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 comes to mind:

     Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly. He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years.
     “I think you’re crazy,” was the way Clevinger had responded to Dunbar’s discovery.
     “Who wants to know?” Dunbar answered.
     “I mean it,” Clevinger insisted.
     “Who cares?” Dunbar answered.
     “I really do. I’ll even go so far as to concede that life seems longer I—”
     “—is longer I—“
     “—is longer—Is longer? All right, is longer if it’s filled with periods of boredom and discomfort, b—“
     “Guess how fast?” Dunbar said suddenly.
     “Huh?”
     “They go,” Dunbar explained.
     “Years.”
     “Years.”
     “Years,” said Dunbar. “Years, years, years.”
     “Clevinger, why don’t you let Dunbar alone?” Yossarian broke in. “Don’t you realize the toll this is taking?”
     “It’s all right,” said Dunbar magnanimously. “I have some decades to spare. Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?”
     “And you shut up also,” Yossarian told Orr, who had begun to snigger.
     “I was just thinking about that girl,” Orr said. “That girl in Sicily. That girl in Sicily with the bald head.”
     “You’d better shut up also,” Yossarian warned him.
     “It’s your fault,” Dunbar said to Yossarian. “Why don’t you let him snigger if he wants to? It’s better than having him talking.”
     “All right. Go ahead and snigger if you want to.”
     “Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?” Dunbar repeated to Clevinger. “This long.” He snapped his fingers. “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air. Today you’re an old man.”
     “Old?” asked Clevinger with surprise. “What are you talking about?”
     “Old.”
     “I’m not old.”
     “You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast. How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?” Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.
     “Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone. “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long. But in that event, who wants one?”
     “I do,” Dunbar told him.
     “Why?” Clevinger asked.
     “What else is there?”

     The characters above were at war. They were pilots and bombardiers. Every time they went aloft, people on the ground would shoot at them. When they were on the ground, sometimes people in the air would shoot at them. Truly, they could die at any instant.

     But isn’t that true of all of us?

* * *

     Asceticism’s opposite pole, hedonism, makes no greater sense. If life is nothing but pleasures, ultimately it will be pointless. All the hedonist’s memories will be of sensation. Love? Achievement? Legacy? Those would be absent from the picture.

     Not being either an ascetic or a hedonist, I can’t see the attractions. But there are people in both those camps. I’m willing to let them have their “fun” without any interference from me. What grieves me somewhat is when they try to pull me in after them.

     “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” (Genesis 3:19) But in between, we have plenty of chances to be more than mere dust: to live, to love, to achieve, to enjoy, to thank and praise God, and to enlarge life for oneself and others. The ascetic spurns those chances. His reasoning may not be that of the ascetic across the street, but their ends are the same: to exclude the pleasures from life.

     Would he answer Clevinger’s “Why?” as Dunbar did? If not, what would he say?

     Have a nice day.