Depleasuring
Among the pleasures of old age — a physical condition I had the honour of entering into, during February of 2021 — is that one is offered the opportunity to give up several of one’s pleasures. This isn’t offered as a choice, however. One simply cannot do what one was, perhaps habitually, doing before; although in some cases an old pleasure is replaced by a new one. I used to love long walks, for instance. Now I do short walks, followed by falling over, and have all the excitement of subsequently getting up. Since my son got me a “walker” — or “stroller” as I call it — this pleasure, too, has gone away. But one gets used to not falling over, as I have now discovered.
A truly cosmic pleasure, in my former life, was reading; and extremely ancillary to that, shopping in “beukstores.” Indeed, when compelled to live in some over-populous city, I would quickly establish where all the beukstores were located, and visit them during my daily, long-distance walks. Two features of my life assisted this compulsion. The other was my freedom from even short-term employment. For some reason, beginning a very long time ago, I had never thought of applying for a job. Leisure was preferable. Jobs were simply supplied to me, by miracle, whenever I might need one. Indeed, sometimes I had to be talked into taking some entirely necessary employment. I found the moral arguments most decisive, though most discouraging, for I was born into that class of men who won’t take the dole. (This bespeaks white privilege.)
There you go.
For nearly five years I have not been in a beukstore, except when some saintly person gives me a lift; for I live in Parkdale — Vallis Hortensis as I call it — a part of this vastly populous city in which there are no beukstores; and in which none are conceivable, because no one reads, except junk paperbacks. (There used to be some people who could read a newspaper.)
Being without new beuks is certainly an advantage, which the Catholic Church once recognized, for she created the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, to help her members stay away from works deemed heretical or immoral. A quick glance at the modern world will tell you it is gone, and the Wicked Pedia will tell you it was “cancelled” in 1966. By coincidence, even though not yet a Catholic, I decided not to obtain beuks published after the moon landing in 1969; for it seemed that all the best ones were published before.
I had already noticed that the selection of good beuks had much contracted in the beukstores, so I suppose not being able to visit them is no great loss. And now that one is old one realizes, … what?