“The Hidden Pleasures of Life”

This is the title of a book by Theodor Zeldin, hidden behind others, and pulled from the shelves here in my Ploiesti flat and one of whose attractions is its format – its pages are rounded and have margins which contain a couple of phrases to give us a sense of the text. One useful review puts it like this -

Theodore Zeldin is a curious man. And “The Hidden Pleasures of Life” a curious book. Over the course of twentyeight interconnected reflections, each beginning with the reported experiences of some figure from history, the author addresses old-fashioned philosophical questions:

• what makes a life go well?

• how should one live?

We begin with Hajj Sayyah, an Iranian student who leaves his home in 1859 at the age of twenty three and travels for eighteen years, meeting the great and the good, without any letters of recommendation or influential relatives. Sayyah is an adventurer whose quest is to discover the people of the world. Zeldin takes Sayyah, along with his other emblems, to point towards the nature of a good life. A good life involves curiosity. What is a curious life? One in which you seek to know other people. Not impersonally, as falling under this or that system of categories, nor superficially, in the ways in which we ordinarily interact. No, the point of living is to know each other properly – where that involves sharing our private thoughts and conversing on those topics which shape our lives. (Zeldin’s Oxford Muse Foundation organizes meals at which strangers are seated in pairs and given a Menu of Conversation, including such questions as “What are the limits of your compassion?” and “What moral, intellectual, aesthetic and social effects does the work you do have on others and on yourself?” Zeldin would be a wonderful lunch companion, but you might hate sitting next to him on a long plane journey.)

Conversing with others gives meaning to our lives by allowing us to learn how others see the world and, in turn, to share what it is that we see. Zeldin’s curiosity demands that we give up on the superficial frivolities that grease our everyday interactions and open instead the secret chambers of our hearts and minds, displaying, in Virginia Woolf’s phrase, the “tablets bearing sacred inscriptions, which if one could spell them out would teach one everything but [are] never offered openly, never made public”.

Theodor Zeldin will be 90 in a few months and is perhaps best known for his encouragement of the art of conversation but also a maverick historian whose books have searched for answers to three main questions

• Where can a person find more inspiring ways of spending each day?

• What ambitions remain unexplored, beyond happiness, prosperity, faith, love, technology, or therapy?

• What role could there be for individuals with independent minds, or those who feel isolated, different, or are sometimes labeled as misfits?

His work has brought people together to engage in conversations in a variety of settings – communal and business – on the basis of some basic principles

The Hidden Pleasures of Life can be downloaded in full via  

https://vdoc.pub/documents/the-hidden-pleasures-of-life-a-new-way-of-remembering-the-past-and-imagining-the-future-6hl9gfrn62g0. It's an epub so does need conversion