Delights

Four and a half years ago, when my partner had to go to Mt. Lavinia for a conference, I decided to tag along. While she spent her days in meetings and workshops, I took full advantage of our sea-facing room to get some much needed momentum towards finishing my book. The crashing waves at Mt. Lavinia and ceaselessly comforting Sri Lankan food kept me company for a few days of solitude and metronomic writing. We spent our last day at the Black Cat Café in Colombo, and it was in their charming library cum bookshop that we acquired the book that is the inspiration for this post and (hopefully) series.

In 1949, J B Priestley wrote a collection of essays about little things in life that caused him unending delight. This anthology, called Delight, inspired another florilegium sixty years later called Modern Delight, which had contributors ranging from Stephen Fry to Kate Mosse to Nick Hornby to Bill Nighy. While I am yet to find the Priestley version aside from a .txt file on Internet Archive, which seems like a throughly disagreeable way to read it, its modern update was sitting invitingly at the Black Cat Café in Colombo. The essays are short, fleeting reads and much like their subjects, delightful.

Since I read this book, I have been toying with the idea of documenting everyday delights. As someone whose worldview has been guided in equal parts by Epicureanism and Daoism, the word “delight” captures the ideal midway point between the ephemeral nature of “pleasure” and the despairing ambition that accompanies the idea of “happiness”. When Priestley wrote the original volume, it was set against the backdrop of the Second World War in England, with the economy in poor shape and rationing in force. While many of the “delights” captured by Priestley would be anachronistic in this day, such as breakfast on the deck of a ship, many it appeared, were timeless. The thrill of waiting in the dark, after the house lights have dimmed, or the self-assurance exercised in not going to a party may have seemed like classics that would never get old. Yet, the pandemic has taught us otherwise.

As we went into the first phase of lockdown in March 2020, I was struck by the relevance of the Delight, both versions, to the peculiar next few months, and years that we were stepping into. The first two months of the lockdown also meant living without what had to come pass as the default of consumeristic, globalised, urban living that I was used to — eating out and ordering in, ready availability of goods and services, travel and retail therapy. As the lockdowns lifted, it became much easier to access goods, but life, as we knew it, had changed, even if only in small ways, and hopefully, left all of us with a bit more perspective. 

This series will focus on delights we can experience, some which we could even experience even during the strictest lockdowns pandemic without putting ourselves at risk, others which we can access in life post pandemic without having to resort to our worst consumerist selves, the little delights that can punctuate the drudgery of monotonous living, the small pleasures that can add some narrative to our days, even when they are stuck in a loop.