Topic

Enjoyment

Enjoyment in this collection is insistently located in the present tense. Lincoln's life-in-your-years maxim is the philosophical foundation: the quantity of days is not the measure. Montaigne arrives at the same point: a man may live long and live very little. Wilde, characteristically, refuses the implication — to live is the rarest thing in the world; most people exist — which converts the observation into indictment. Twain on letting it fight out inside is the anti-advice: the secret of life is to enjoy yourself and stop worrying about the chemistry. Tagore's joy-service-bliss progression describes a specifically enacted pleasure — not the condition but the activity. Disraeli's "life is too short to be small" is the most concise encapsulation of this section's argument: the obstacle to enjoyment is usually not circumstance but the smallness of our expectations and ambitions. What the collection argues, collectively, is that enjoyment is not passive — it requires a decision, made repeatedly, about how to use the attention you have.