Character, said Schopenhauer, is destiny.
I remember reading that in my studio on Rue du Docteur Roux, a meandering back street in the 15th arrondisement of Paris, one block down from the Institute Pasteur where they would first discover the ticking HIV time bomb. I read a lot of things in that odd little room, a place I fondly referred to as the “beach motel” because it was part of a row of low-lying studio apartments that always reminded me of the squat, bunker-like concrete motels that run all along the California coast; rendezvous points for secret trysts, or way stations for the lost, the downbeat, the broken. In that cramped cubicle that another American ex-pat bequeathed to me when I first arrived in August of 1981, I had time for a lot of reading and musing. And as many a would-be writer had done before me during their Paris years, I also kept a running dialogue with myself by noting down whatever captured my interest. Not a diary as such, but I wrote letters, ostensibly to friends but really mostly to myself, which I would Xerox afterwards and then store away for some time in the future when I thought I might want to read it all. I guess that future is now. I went through some of those old papers and found this, dated December 22, 1982, 9:05 PM:
A few hours ago I finished reading an essay by Schopenhauer entitled “On the Suffering of the World”. A meal of fish and brown rice aided whatever musings over it I might muster. At any rate, I suppose it is important to note that this meal (including two cheeses, Fromage des Pyrenées and Bleu d’Auvergne) plus red wine, a Côtes du Rhône, labelled Landrillat) has come between my lecture and the reflections which I am about to set down. Important, that is, insofar as Mr. S talks a bit about man’s constant, unquenchable thirst for pleasure. Speaking of pleasure, he tells us that "…we shall find that, in order to increase his pleasures, man has intentionally added to the number and pressure of his needs, which in their original state were not much more difficult to satisfy than those of the brute. Hence luxury in all its forms; delicate food, the use of tobacco and opium, spirituous liquors, fine clothes and the thousand and one things that he considers necessary to his existence.”What I ate this evening might more justifiably be termed crude, though I do admit that, however indelicate, the meal did in fact carry pleasure with it. The pleasure was more in the action involved in putting the thing together. By occupying myself in such a way, that is, pulling out pots and pans, cleaning the fish, measuring the rice into a casserole, presiding over the hot plate, etc., I can momentarily lose myself. Without thinking about it, I click into automatic and my thoughts, however empty, trail on unattended. In this there is a kind of pleasure, a pleasure ignorant of itself. In fact, it is only now, upon reflection, that I can call my occupation with the meal a “pleasure”. Add this then, to the “number and pressure” of my needs.
I guess at the time I wrote this I had a rather romantic image of myself as somehow suffering, there in my lonely room, with a chill Paris winter nipping at my door. I must have been going through my Thomas de Quincy, “Confessions of an Opium Eater” stage, judging by the Romantic strains of the prose, with the “insofars” and “about to set downs”. I include this passage not for any intrinsic value it may have (the musings of a 26 year old hold a certain charm but do try one’s patience) but more to recall what was a time apart; Paris and indolence (for me anyway) and the wines and the blue cheeses that never again tasted the same as they did when I ate on a makeshift table next to my Olivetti typewriter. A time when I could spend hours in a cubicle lying on my bed, reading or seducing or planning this future I now inhabit .But as I read further along in my stunning exegesis of “On the Suffering of the World”, I found this:
…finally, in the last few pages of his essay, Mr.S comes to what has been on his mind, I’m sure, for the greater part of these pages.“If you want a sage compass to guide you through life, and to banish all doubt as to the right way of looking at it, you cannot do better than accustom yourself to regard this world as a penitentiary, a sort of penal colony, or ergosterion, as the earliest philosophers called it.” According to Schopenhauer, if we get used to the fact that life is a penal colony, all the misery that is concomitant will seem not at all unusual or irregular. In fact, we will find that “everything is as it should be, in a world where each of us pays the penalty of existence in his own peculiar way.”
He leads finally to the conclusion that we are all fellow sufferers, compagnons de misère, and for this reason, empathy (he says tolerance, patience, regard, and love of neighbour) should be our ruling star.
I was very impressed with myself for discovering this “ergosterion” thing. I went around for a good month after that talking to anyone who would listen to me about the “penitentiary”. In fact, I went to the American Library and hunted down a Greek dictionary to get a good translation. What I found was this: Ergosterion = Workshop of Pain. So there I was, in my little cubicle in the heart of Paris, the City of Light, eating mussels and drinking wine and thinking I was in a workshop of pain. Little did I suspect then that this bohemian life I was leading was a workshop of pure epicurean delight - the real “workshop of pain” was still some years off in the future, a future where the blue cheese would never again be quite as blue.
Kurt Stewart copyright 2005
