The Contagion of Delight

Delight mutates faster than any politics can adapt to it.

This past weekend, the first night of the full moon, my husband and I went to a nightclub. It’s not something either of us really are known for doing, or not at least since we were in our 20’s, and it was definitely not the sort of place we’d normally find ourselves in.

We needed to. I don’t know really how better to explain this except that it was an imperative, a response to an unspoken yet nevertheless loudly heard demand that we actually go to a place where people are and purge from our souls the isolation, fear, and social alienation imposed upon us these last two years.

A month ago, on my way to visit my sister in the city, I had gotten myself a bit lost. To get there, I ride my bike to a nearby village, hop a train coming from Germany heading into the city, and from there normally take a tram and then a bus to wherever I’m ultimately headed. That’s usually one of the small Chinese or Turkish shops where I buy all the things I cannot find in stores near me, or to purchase clothing, or more usually to visit my sister.

I know the way without looking, yet that day I got completely lost because everything had changed. Not the buildings, not the streets, not the transit stops, but rather the people, each of them suddenly wearing faces rather than masks. A week before, on the weekend of our wedding, the government of Luxembourg had finally dropped all the masking requirements, and suddenly the streets were full of humans.

I’ve never been one to indulge in misanthropy. I’ve had friends who really just don’t like other people and are true introverts or what have you. I’m neither, though because I am a writer I find I’m either alone or with just one other person the vast majority of my time. And though I get easily overwhelmed when there are a lot of people around, it’s because I like people so damn much that I’m no good at closing myself off from what they’re all doing and saying around me.

The last two years made me think that perhaps I wasn’t really a ‘people person,’ but that’s really just the sort of story you tell yourself to get through. Best to tell yourself such things when there are no other options, I guess, but deep down you know such things aren’t true and you’re really just deeply disappointed and sad about it all.

The unmasking made me remember all that. People are fascinating and confusing and beautiful and bizarre and relentlessly interesting even when they’re completely dull. Strangers everywhere all walking about going on with their lives, and you get the briefest glimpse of their existence on this earth as they pass you on the street.

Without masks, they had faces again, which meant their realness was harder to ignore. More so, your own realness suddenly becomes undeniable because they see your face too. A woman looked overlong at me as she approached and passed on the sidewalk. She smiled an interested, flirtatious smile and regardless of my lack of interest in women I couldn’t stop smiling after.

Because I was still smiling about it as I passed on and looked at others, some of them smiled back too, likely spreading the contagion of delight throughout the day.

That’s how I’d become lost. I knew the way, of course, but the joy and life of the crowds thronging the streets without fear of each other swept me up along other paths, and it was the best kind of lost a human can experience.

Going to the nightclub was a bit the same thing. Good gods, the music was horrible, the whole place smelled of too many high-end French perfumes clashing together, and the dancing was embarrassingly ridiculous. This all made it more delightful, though, because it’s precisely this sort of frivolous absurdity that dissolves all the frigid and staid qualities of civilization which masking enforced. People said reckless things to each other, and dressed oddly, and most of all looked at each other the way you have to when you all have faces.

It’s hard to forget that such places and such gatherings were the most vilified during the last few years. At the beginning of all this, news stories and social media posts with images of people doing delightful things became a kind of public shaming the same way ration-cheaters were held up for all to hate during the world wars. How dare these people go on living when the rest of us are not? Crowding the beaches during a pandemic, using more than their allotment of butter: they were all of course the reason the rest of us suffered and the war/virus hadn’t ended yet.

What I found myself thinking at that club, perhaps too much because I really think too much, was how in such places and in such moments the machine logic of political morality cannot find purchase. After all, identity itself is a mask, a way to hide the real of you from the real of others, and delight dissolves identity in the universal solvent of joy and the relentless real.

The scourge of Woke politics and identititarianism we see now is ultimately born from the internet and the university, because they are both arenas of the abstract. It escapes those accelerating laboratories, of course, stretching out its miasmic tendrils into the minds of everyone infected by their discourse, but it takes a long time for it to truly reproduce in its victims. It might choke out the breath of other ideas for awhile, but real, raw life persists beyond such suffocation.

Yesterday, two days after that nightclub, my husband and I hosted a very large meal at our house. It’s traditional here to have a lunch the Monday after Easter even for non-religious sorts, and this year my husband decided to invite people from our village as a way of further celebrating our wedding, thanking them for their gifts, and also ritualizing my existence as part of the village. While I’ve lived here now for over two years, marrying a villager means I’ve married into the village, a completely anti-modern idea which I’ve come to adore.

He gets a bit hardcore with such events. One of his favorite films and his relentless inspiration is Le Festin de Babette (Babette’s Feast), a beautiful and subtle Danish film. The story is quite simple: a French woman arrives in a remote and rural village where the daughters of a Puritan prophet continue on their father’s austere legacy and care for his followers. The woman is a refugee from the strife after the Paris Commune, and becomes their servant and cook in exchange for safety. Then, one day the woman learns she won a lottery, and decides to use all the money she’s gotten to prepare a singular Parisian feast for the village, one moment of utter delight.

Whenever my husband decides we’ll invite large groups of people over, he’s suddenly Babette. Weeks of planning and days (this time four days) of cooking beforehand, all to create one moment of exquisite delight, of rare elegance, and of really some of the best food you’ll ever eat. And each time, just like that film, everyone leaves the moment feeling like they were aristocracy, kings and queens parting a feast in their honor.

Delight is one of the strongest magics humans have ever known, and maybe the only true antidote to alienation. I’m currently teaching the course based on my book, Being Pagan, and we’re in the third week, “being body.” Each week of the course I suggest personal work to help the participants inhabit the core truth of that week’s work, and for this week the suggested “homework” is as follows:

This week I would like you to engage in a simple bodily pleasure you do not normally let yourself experience. This pleasure should involve your senses instead of your mind. Potential pleasures include:

• Slowly savoring a particularly fragrant meal with fresh herbs or rare spices

• Getting a massage.

• Soaking your feet in water, or walking barefoot over grass or sand.

• Taking a nap in the warm sun.

• Smelling flowers for more than just a brief whiff; instead, breathing them in.

• Swimming, or taking a very long bath.

• Gently stretching for long periods of time, letting your entire body relax.

In other words, cultivating moments of delight, moments when you can forget yourself (your “self,” or specifically the thinking part of you) and instead just experience.

This has always been the missed understanding in all those colonial and missionary accounts of indigenous contact, the ones in which the writers discuss in awe how the people they encounter act like innocent “children.” That’s the funny bit, of course, because childhood was the last time any of those writers felt allowed to experience raw life fully, and thus assume delight is something only children experience. Their amazement is really longing and sorrow for the Real which they stopped letting be real.

This is also the primary mechanism of ressentiment, the vampiric gaze constantly animating Woke Ideology. How dare others enjoy their existence without constantly apologizing for who they are, without following unwritten rules of social castes and ideological structures that imprison us in our own minds? Others delight, and we cannot let ourselves delight, and therefore delight must be snuffed out of the world.

Delight is contagious, but ressentiment inoculates us against its virulence. Fortunately, though, delight mutates faster than any politics can adapt to it. It spreads through smiles and laughter, and like children it touches everything in sight. Disinfect every surface and erect as many barriers as you can, yet it will still eventually find a vector into your soul.

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PS: Part one of an interview/discussion that I did with Paul Kingsnorth has just been posted publicly here. I think you’ll really enjoy it.