Reasons to be cheerful

13 December 2003

Theodore Dalrymple on the joy of seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary — in gooseberries, for example, even in human beings

Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ‘How best can I describe this?’ I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise — for it is not a fashionable view — it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself. I feel an inexpressible joy when patients use the English language creatively, if not always correctly according to the strictest canons. For all that it has changed, England is still the land of Dickens, and our people are still capable of the verbal inventiveness and felicities of Mrs Gamp or Mrs Gummidge. Only the other day, for example, a patient complained to me that there was a financial crisis, though, like Mrs Gradgrind and the pain somewhere in the room, he could not positively say that he had got it. He was able to add that a lot of money had been spent, until it could be spent no more; but more than that he could not say.

Then again, a man who came to interview me for a publication the other day pointed out that I was never bored. I hadn’t thought of that before, but it’s true: I’m never bored. I’m appalled, horrified, angered, but never bored. The world appears to me so infinite in its variety that many lifetimes could not exhaust its interest. So long as you can still be surprised, you have something to be thankful for (that is one of the reasons why the false knowingness of street credibility is so destructive of true happiness).

A few years ago, I went to an exhibition of Spanish still lifes at the National Gallery, and was taken aback, as were all visitors, by the paintings of Sanchez Cotan, of whom I (and I suspect the great majority of visitors) had previously known nothing. His paintings of fruit and vegetables, suspended in a parabola in an open stone window, were among the most moving that I have ever seen; and never again have I looked at vegetables and fruit in the prosaic way I did before. Thanks to Sanchez Cotan, I can see great beauty in a leek or a cabbage, or even in a potato, to the great enrichment of my life. (I do not think it a coincidence that Sanchez Cotan was a monk.) Not long afterwards, I saw the paintings of the Dutchman, Adriaen Coorte, who specialised in the humble art of painting gooseberries. The translucence of this fruit now strikes me as so beautiful that I can gaze at them with intense pleasure, if not for hours (that would be an exaggeration), at least for minutes. I suspect that this reflectiveness is one of the consolations of age.

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Marijke Boucherie

August 17th, 2008 10:30am Report this comment

Thank you for your beautiful text, especially the sentence: "All in all, my life is a rich one, and it is rich because the world is so much richer than my life can ever be". MB

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