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Saturday, February 26, 2005
Pleasure And Novelty
According to Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, pleonasm is "redundancy of language in speaking or writing; the use of more words than are necessary to express the idea." For example, to say "I saw it with my own eyes" is to commit a pleonasm; whose eyes other than your own could you have seen it with?
In an article in Chronicles some years ago, Thomas Fleming coined the word pleonasty, by which he meant the accumulation of worldly goods beyond one's proper need or use for them: a generalized material gluttony. He who piles up treasures on Earth beyond his provable capacity to make use of them is a pleonast. (Your Curmudgeon would nominate Imelda Marcos as the patron "saint" of pleonasts.) Gluttony might have served for this application, if not for its excessively strong connotations of appetite for food. Fleming's neologism is therefore useful for speaking of hyper-acquisitive behavior beyond the dinner table.
What's most evident about the pleonast is that his obsessive accumulation is salve for an ache. It isn't about utility in any sense; indeed, by weighing himself down with possessions for which he has no use, the pleonast pays heavily in a number of currencies. Stories of persons found dead, buried in collapsed piles of their own possessions and unable to escape, are legion.
Some pleonasts are driven by an inability to feel secure; they cannot bring themselves to believe that commodity X will be available to them in the future, so they pile it up in the present, while it's still available. Others are reacting against a history of poverty, whether absolute or imposed; they acquire to excess because at some earlier time they were unable or forbidden to acquire at all. And still others are pursuing a diminishing pleasure by the most self-defeating of means: doing it faster, harder, and to ever greater expense.
It's that third group your Curmudgeon is thinking about today. Pleonasty in Fleming's sense is materially focused. But the concept can be extended to the pursuit of any sort of satisfaction, including those that don't involve material means. Pleonastic obsession -- the attempt to recapture the full magnitude of some remembered delight by pursuing it to excess, despite the futility of the approach -- is a trap into which anyone can fall, and many do. Sexual pleonasty is the most obvious example, but virtually any satisfaction from his youth can come to obsess a middle-aged man as he casts about for something from which to take pleasure as his vital forces decline.
There's a pleonastic crisis abroad in this country. Its principal sufferers are the Baby Boomers, the 75 million Americans born in the two decades after World War II, who are now sliding through our middle years and into seniority. Most of us have lived rich, joyous lives -- rich with the joys of youth. However, for one reason or another, many have never learned how to surrender the things of youth for the satisfactions of maturity and old age. We're clinging, and it's wounding us.
An iconic expression of the driving force behind this form of pleonasty came from Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw, during a recent segment of Spike TV's Untold series. At the climax of a tirade about his inability to find peace in his post-NFL years, he cried, "If this is supposed to be so great, how come I'm not happy?" It was clearly heartfelt, and all the more wringing for this: every one of us will face, sooner or later, what Bradshaw had already experienced: the end of his days as a power in those domains from which he drew his sense of significance.
Some will attempt to ward off the loss of youthful pleasures or the sense of fading occupational significance by mounding possessions around them. Some will cling, denying the passage of time and its depredations, straining to prolong their time of influence on their field, whether by hanging on longer than they should or by inserting themselves into the affairs of younger practitioners. Some will act out in other ways. But there's only one path that's truly forward, that offers any real hope of renewal: to go on to something new.
Newness -- novelty -- requires change. Change is hard and tiring, and often makes one impatient. But the alternative to novelty is pleonasty: the pursuit of steadily diminishing pleasures and satisfactions by endlessly repeating those actions that have garnered them in the past. It doesn't take a lot of economics to grasp why this is a road to oblivion.
The older we get, the more important this bit of knowledge becomes.
Ironies abound. The older we get, the more easily we tire, and the less change we can withstand without needing a good long nap. But the Universe is inflexible about its rules, and persists in not caring a whit about any man's preferences. The refreshment of body, mind, and spirit requires effort, and the effort must include a willingness to embrace change, at least in moderate degree.
Not all changes are good ones; nothing is more fatuous than a commitment to generic, unspecified "change." One must be able to tell good changes from bad. But that capacity is seldom lacking in the man who's lived well.
How many of us Baby Boomers have lived well -- well enough to know that the things of youth must eventually be surrendered in favor of other pursuits? How many of us have learned that two is not always better than one, and three not always better than two? And how many will embarrass themselves by pretending to be wrinkled teenagers, forever partying down as if their bodies and brains could still take the punishment and reap the full rewards, rather than admit that the time has come to seek a newer world...a world the young man, lacking the perspectives bestowed by time and chance, could never reach?
