NEGATIVE PLEASURES
Epstein, Joseph
Casual NEGATIVE PLEASURES A friend of mine, a highly intelligent lawyer with an interest in human nature, not long ago asked me if I knew any men given over in a serious way to chasing women....
...I consider golf, like the Soviet Union, good only for the few excellent jokes it has produced, whose punch lines ring in my head: “So for seventeen holes, it was hit the ball and drag Irving, hit the ball and drag Irving...
...Ah, not to wake early on weekend mornings, and then not to pull on peach-colored pants, shine up one’s driver, kiss one’s putter for luck, and drive off, to return at dusk one or two strokes better or worse than the last time out—not to do any of these things is for me, as Omar Khayyam had it, “paradise enow...
...Cleverly, I never went on to acquire a set of clubs...
...When I was a kid, my friends and I used occasionally to play miniature golf, and sometimes we would buy buckets of balls to hit off driving ranges...
...Whenever I am driving behind one, the mortal words of Jackie Mason on the subject return to me: “Sports Utility Vehicle, hell...
...At one point, I had charge of four children, and toting them around in a station wagon would seem to have made good sense, yet I resisted...
...One of them, who struck it very rich, is said to belong to ten golf clubs here and in Europe...
...I am very pleased, for example, never to have owned a station wagon...
...I have in fact lived in suburbs at various times in my adult life, but acquiring a station wagon would have forced me to regard myself as irretrievably suburbanite, which would have badly dampened my spirits...
...It’s a truck, schmuck...
...I had to agree that, with the womenchasing men I knew, this seemed to be true...
...What I have in mind are negative pleasures, the genuine delight found in things avoided or deliberately not done...
...Another great negative pleasure I enjoy is not having a Ph.D...
...Climbing up and into and down and out of one of those monstrous heaps of metal would depress me beyond reckoning...
...Several of these same friends did, and today, it is not going too far to say that golf is close to being the main event in their lives...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...Still, when I think that I shall never drive off, the letters Ph.D...
...as part of the vanity plate on my station wagon, for yet another round of golf, I realize, with a surge of pride, that I have not lived entirely in vain...
...When I said I did, he asked if I’d ever noticed that, at the end of a lifetime of doing so, these men seemed to have no regrets...
...I love to hear stories about men and women who never fi nished, or even entered, college and went on to score great artistic and fi nancial successes, and only wish I could claim to be one of them...
...A mediocre student, I never for a moment considered going to graduate school, but I am fairly certain that I couldn’t have endured the various tortures that acquiring a Ph.D...
...Or, Moses to Jesus: “What do you want to do here—screw around here, or play golf...
...Not easy to get through life without collecting a hatful of regrets...
...Owning an SUV, the station wagon of our day, would be even more dispiriting...
...Some of the most deeply stupid people in the country have Ph.D.’s...
...These trivial but to me genuine negative pleasures may not seem much to brag about, and in the grander scheme of things they aren’t...
...one I remember had the name Stop ’n’ Sock, after a famous Chicago food emporium of the day known as Stop ’n’ Shop...
...I have an A.B., in absentia (as I always prefer to add), and mildly regret that I have that...
...The initial expense must have deterred me...
...Others have settled for that Valhalla of so many commercial warriors, condominiums on golf courses...
...An even greater delight, perhaps the chief negative pleasure in my life, is that I have never golfed...
...My own are too commonplace to describe here, but I do count a few items in my life that are the very reverse of regrets...
...entails...
...In the early 1960s, I came close to buying a used Volkswagen bus, but when the car dealership (Cliff Packer’s Auto Ranch in Little Rock, Arkansas, salesmen equipped with ten-gallon hats and with toothpicks in mouth at no extra charge) wouldn’t take cash but would only sell the bus to me on credit, the deal was killed...
Vol. 13 • March 2008 • No. 26
