Let's explore and reclaim pleasure

Quote from Philia

I myself am stuck on pleasure = food ... and hope to move beyond that.

That's funny but a good start!

I was looking for the Metrodorus quote for that but all I found was:

**Plutarch, _Against Colotes_, 2, p. 1108C:** ... those who keep shouting that the _good_ is to be found in the belly and that they would not give a copper coin with a hole in it for all the virtues in bulk apart from pleasure.

For me, pleasure encompasses a wide spectrum:

• Walking in the woods and admiring the sun shining through the leaves.
• Looking up at the sky, eyes closed, and feeling the warmth of the sun on my face.
• Partaking in lively conversation.
• Finding an old book on the shelves at the library and feeling the imprint of the printing plates on the page.
• Losing myself in reading or working on a translation.

Pleasure can be big and all-encompassing, or small and intimate, shared or solitary.

Those are my initial thoughts.

Thanks for starting this thread, Kalosyni !

This is a wide subject! Allow me to narrow it through the lens of a few poems I like.

Romance:

Quote

Drink to me only with thine eyes,

And I will pledge with mine;

Or leave a kiss but in the cup,

And I’ll not look for wine.

The thirst that from the soul doth rise

Doth ask a drink divine;

But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,

I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,

Not so much honouring thee

As giving it a hope, that there

It could not withered be.

But thou thereon didst only breathe,

And sent’st it back to me;

Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

Not of itself, but thee.

-Ben Jonson

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simple hospitalities:

Quote

Arrived there, the little house they fill, Ne looke for entertainement, where none was: Rest is their feast, and all things at their will; The noblest mind the best contentment has.

-Edmund Spencer

The countryside: (from a much longer poem)

Quote

[...] Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee

With other edifices, when they see

Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,

May say their lords have built, but thy lord dwells.

-Ben Jonson

Wine: (from a much longer poem)

Quote

O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth. Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth!

-John Keats

Traversing the landscape:

Quote

Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

-Robert Frost

Walking alone by night:

Quote

The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

-Thomas Gray

Thinking about nature and the cosmos:

Quote

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

-Lord Byron

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Finding a good translation of a classic text:

Quote

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been

Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

-John Keats

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And now one or two of my own:

Quote

No more! Aye, fly! Fly to thine pleasure

Great noble bird, sun-midst sailing,

Prow a-gleaming, southward seeking;

Seek thee still a sweeter shore

And I, a sweet philosophy.

Yet I will linger here a time

Tasting of the morning's fruits—

'Ere long the yawning sea shall call:

The tide shall fail, and then the light,

And we shall mingle, you and I

Void with void, and mote with mote.

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And in lieu of a lucrative synecure for writing poetry: the pleasure of my day job, land-surveying!

Quote

Thoreau and the Geometry of Misattribution: Field Notes

Mid-morning, June the twenty-fifth. Clear, calm;

The water's edge of Choctawhatchee Bay—

All glass and brass and darting precision—

Where little fins answer the noiseless psalm

Of some invisible magnetism.

Our survey maps the shore's meandering way

Easterly; thence perambulates this marsh

And cypress swamp. "Never look back unless

You are planning to go that way"? A harsh

And hollow saw; return is not regress—

A surveyor's first sight is his backsight.

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That last one I sent off to the Walden Woods Project (Thoreau was a surveyor by trade), and they (allegedly) filed it away in their archives.

A couple of quite pleasurable activities that I've recently begun are restorative yoga and meditation. Although I've done both activities for years at a time in the past (yoga having been far more active than passive), I'm pursuing them free of dogma and with no "path" and am discovering a new and somewhat guilty and decadent pleasure in them. Which somehow makes them even more pleasurable!

A very insightful post, Kalosyni ! What you are describing is exactly the process of opening to the Feelings as a guide. Half of the guide is "pain": not avoiding or suppressing the unpleasant, but being guided by that as much as by pleasure.

A pleasant and fulfilling recovery to you!

Quote from Philia

.and so it would seem that the mind must be tenderly cared for so that pleasure and joy can flower

A lovely way to phrase it!

Yes that's a great way to summarize.

We need all the help we can get in articulating the point as eloquently as possible - which is - that "pleasure" as Epicurus is describing it is a wide and sweeping term that includes everything that we "feel" to be pleasant. No matter how much the high-brows look down their noses and accuse the Epicureans of focusing on the "belly," even the most intellectual of pleasures also qualify as pleasure because the criteria is that we "feel" it to be so - not that we identify it through logical analysis.

Well summarized, Kalosyni !

People seem to sometimes think that pleasure always has to be capital-P Pleasure. But the simple everyday pleasures can be powerful due in fact to their being readily at hand. We just have to remember to appreciate and notice them.

I had an experience today driving to work in traffic. Several cars ahead of me, another driver had his window down and I could see soap bubbles coming out his window and floating through traffic. It was so whimsical and unexpected, it made me smile for several blocks the whole way to the parking garage. It was a wonderful way to start the day!

Quote from Cassius

No matter how much the high-brows look down their noses and accuse the Epicureans of focusing on the "belly,"

Not that there's anything wrong with satisfying the belly!!

Those are really some great excerpts from that article. I'm not ready to embrace the idea of chakras (maybe a little too "woo" for me, but taken metaphorically... Maybe?), but I fully endorse the idea of the importance of listening to what one's body is saying. Western inculcation has a generally bad relationship with the body.

But an aspect of this is one's sense of interoception. From researchers like Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett and many others, this sense is linked to well-being. See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5985305/

Wow we have quite an artist here!