Opinion | The Radical Act of Enjoying This Life

It feels to me that one of the arguments you have quietly been making, and then making more loudly in your nonfiction, is that it is a radical act to, in a bodily, physical way, just enjoy this life. So, first, what is sensualism to you? Well, first of all, it’s not even just about the senses. It is, in a more Buddhist or meditative way, if you want to take it that way, it is enjoying what’s happening. Thank you for pandering. I am that, right? Very nice pander. But also, I know that there’s some probably Buddhist listeners out there, and I love all of you. I do little headspace here and there when life requires it, but I do. … I was walking here today, and mostly I’m in the summer upstate, but I came down for this interview, and I’m walking down Broadway and I looked up, and I’m just noticing these beautiful mansard roofs of some of these buildings. Now, I spend half of my year in New York. I forgot all about these mansard roofs. I’m like, damn, somebody did something right architecturally. And New York is such a hodgepodge of good and bad architecture. Maybe that’s one of the things that makes it such a cool city, is that it’s not beautiful, beautiful. It’s just this —— -Michael Kimmelman, when I moved here, which is only a couple of years ago. I read Michael Kimmelman, his book called “The Intimate City,” and he says, the beauty of New York is the juxtaposition of this with that. Yes, with that, this with that. And that allowed me to see the beauty of New York. It was like a single sentence that reshaped how I looked at a whole place. This with that, this with that. So, look, I agree with that wonderful man, wonderful lunch date. This and that. I’m going down the street, and this and that is creating a fear of great pleasure in me. But recently, I got a dachshund, which is the world’s best dog, clearly. And there’s giant sausage completely out of control and his great sense of smell, obviously. So he will walk down the street and there’s a corner where every dog pees on, and he approaches it like a Talmudic scholar, and he sniffs here. He sniffs there. Yes, Rocco was here at 12:30. That’s right, that’s right. Let’s remember that. He loves — and his tail is wagging away. He’s just enjoying the hell out of life. He enjoys this more than he loves food, obviously, but — so, we all have this part in us that is able to enjoy things on this crazy level. Most of it is free. Some of my hobbies are slightly expensive, but most of this stuff is wonderfully free. It’s all around us, you know. So the more — and the more I live, also, I find in some ways that this sense of ambition that younger people have diminishes in some good ways. As I see what the rest of my life will look like, I’m fine with it. Maybe good things will happen; maybe some terrible things will happen. But I’m more or less OK with it, as long as that sense of enjoyment doesn’t leave me.