First order pleasures

All I know of Scrooge McDuck is that he had nephews and he loved to dive and swim in a vault of money.

Never mind petty details about the density and viscosity of cash. He wants to swim in it because other people value it -- not because of its beauty or sensual pleasure. Gold can be pretty, but piles of it aren't terribly aesthetic, though perhaps Smaug might see it so.

Which makes the pleasure rather second-order; not that it is pleasant in itself but it's pleasant because of what other people think about it. You don't enjoy it directly.

One first-order pleasure is admiring the beauty of the refracting crystals in the snow as your headlights shine on them as you drive. Not that I want to swim in the snow, but it makes me happier to look at it, no matter what Vogue says about this year's flake styles.

That's not to say that "first order" is better. Some pleasures are greater when shared, and you can have joy in the pleasure someone you love takes in a gift -- child with a new puppy?

But ... Arm candy or a friend? Caviar or red beans and rice? Up until the xrays burned out my taste buds, I could truthfully claim that no restaurant made the latter dish as well as my mother did, or my wife, or even me.

Looking for happiness

BBC has a story on a man's "searching for secret to happiness".

"Anyone that is fixated on making you feel happy all the time is selling you snake oil" ... "If I could pick one thing that made the greatest difference - after I had been stabilised with treatment - it was, and always will be, work." But not just workaholic type work...

Nobody will tell you what a brave, talented person you are for doing the work of real happiness. But you will feel it in the reactions of people you love, the gratitude of waking up without a sense of dread, the awareness of beauty around you. And knowing you will keep your commitments, and live as a person who doesn't just talk about caring for people but does their best to live that talk.

He quotes Raymond Carver's tombstone inscription, the ideas of which should sound very familiar to many of us (funny how Wikipedia ignores the religious (even if not explicitly christian) aspects of his life):

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Great antiquity

It's straightforward to try to evoke antiquity in a story--describe the ruins of something majestic. Ruin and decay are pretty straightforward--the trick is getting across the majesty. You can throw canned phrases at the problem, like Lovecraft at his worst (which was all too often), but try to do better.

The subject of Bombadil came up at the table (wrt movies), and what use he was to the story. I hadn't known where Bombadil came from--AVI notes that Tolkien was good at revising and repurposing.

Bombadil may be the clearest example. Suppose you think that the oldest thing in the universe isn't majesty but joy. That's not the way most of us think, though there's warrant for thinking so. How do you convey that sense of joy so old and strong that the moment's circumstances don't dent it? Tolkien tried hard--maybe the text was more compelling for him than for us. (Some things I've written have turned out that way.)

I'm glad Jackson didn't try to put Bombadil in--I don't think he'd have caught the sense at all. (Not to mention time constraints.)