. . . According
to your school, virtue has the dignified office of preliminary tester of
pleasures. We shall, however, see whether virtue still remains virtue among
those who treat her with such contempt, for if she leaves her proper station
she can no longer keep her proper name.
In the meanwhile, to keep to the point,
I will show you many men beset by pleasures, men upon whom Fortune has showered
all her gifts, whom you must admit to be bad men.
Look at Nomentanus and Apicius, who
digest all the good things, as they call them, of the sea and land, and review
upon their tables the whole animal kingdom. Look at them as they lie on beds of
roses gloating over their banquet, delighting their ears with music, their eyes
with exhibitions, their palates with flavors. Their whole bodies are titillated
with soft and soothing applications, and lest even their nostrils should be
idle, the very place in which they solemnize the rites of luxury is scented
with various perfumes.
You will say that these men live in the
midst of pleasures. Yet they are ill at ease, because they take pleasure in
what is not good.
—Seneca
the Younger, On the happy life,
Chapter 11 (tr Stewart)
The
problem here boils down to whether virtue is to serve our appetites, or if our
appetites are to serve virtue. If the standards of right and wrong depend upon
desire, however, one will hardly have any right or wrong at all. Morality will
shift and change based upon the convenience of our feelings, and we can clearly
discern the root of the moral relativism that we see all around us.
I was
once speaking to a fellow who insisted that cheating on his wife was actually
doing her a favor. I wasn’t at all sure what to say when he explained that his
trysts, which were only occasional, mind you, as if that made them any better,
helped him to be more calm and relaxed, and that this made her life easier.
There you have the sort of man whose conscience is in the service of his
passions.
Seeing
how the pleasure seeker lives has long saddened me, and I am also deeply
ashamed whenever I have lived this way. The objects of desire may be sex, food,
drink, luxury, money, reputation, or power, but regardless of what it is that
may gratify us, we inevitably become selfish, manipulative, entitled, dishonest,
and disloyal. In desiring to possess and consume, in serving myself, it becomes
impossible for me to serve. Life becomes about grasping, not about giving.
Nomentanus
and Apicius were apparently Roman gourmets, perhaps gourmands, perhaps most
accurately gluttons, well known for their elaborate and luxurious tastes. We
like to frown upon the decadence of the past, though we are hardly any better. I
have had two moments of epiphany about our own excesses, both of which are indelibly
burned into my memory.
The
first was one of those rare moments when I found myself in the world of other
half, in a fancy corporate office on one of the top floors of a skyscraper in
Boston’s Financial District. The cost of the marble and fittings in the
restrooms surely cost more than I would ever earn in my entire lifetime, and
the catered food was worth more than at least a year of my own grocery budget.
I was in awe, but the important people took it all for granted, and one griped
that the champagne was far below his standards.
The
second was just a normal shopping trip with my wife, and we came across a
mother and her two children. The woman was speaking loudly on her cell phone,
complaining to someone about her manicurist. An obese boy sat in in the
shopping cart, wolfing down handfuls of chips from a large bag, leaving a trail
of crumbs behind him on the floor. A slightly older girl, perhaps eleven or
twelve, wearing tight lycra stamped with the word “juicy” on her bottom, was
singing along to Miley Cyrus on her iPod.
I don’t
wish to think of the world as being full of such mindless gorging, not so
different from animals feeding at the trough, but such experiences make it
difficult not to lose hope. I must think not of the symptoms, but of the cure,
and I must remember that the solution is never to simply complain about others,
whether it is about champagne, or manicures, or even gluttonous practices, but
to improve myself.
The
reason I am ill at ease, as Seneca says, when I pursue pleasure as an end is
that I am trying to fill myself with things that are not really part of my
nature at all. I am made to understand, not to conform. I am made to do good
things, not to consume them. I am made to love, not to be gratified.
Written in 2/2006
Image: Georg Emanuel Opiz, The Glutton (1804)
No comments:
Post a Comment