science fair project. I pondered such questions as, “How is pleasure most efficiently maximized?” I wondered if maybe I should spend all my time in Italy in the library, doing research on the history of pleasure. Or maybe I should interview Italians who’ve experienced a lot of pleasure in their lives, asking them what their pleasures feel like, and then writing a report on this topic. (Double-spaced and with one-inch margins, perhaps? To be turned in first thing Monday morning?)
When I realized that the only question at hand was, “How do I define pleasure?” and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became . . . delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day, for the first time in my life, “What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?” With nobody else’s agenda to consider and no other obligations to worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self-specific.
It was interesting for me to discover what I did not want to do in Italy, once I’d given myself executive authorization to enjoy my experience there. There are so many manifestations of pleasure in Italy, and I didn’t have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a pleasure major here, or you’ll get overwhelmed. That being the case, I didn’t get into fashion, or opera, or cinema, or fancy automobiles, or skiing in the Alps. I didn’t even want to look at that much art. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I did not visit a single museum during my entire four months in Italy. (Oh, man—it’s even worse than that. I have to confess that I did go to one museum: the National Museum of Pasta, in Rome.) I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I declared a double major, really—in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).
The amount of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable, and yet so simple. I passed a few hours once in the middle of October that might look like nothing much to the outside observer, but which I will always count amongst the happiest of my life. I found a market near my apartment, only a few streets over from me, which I’d somehow never noticed before. There I approached a tiny vegetable stall with one Italian woman and her son selling a choice assortment of their produce—such as rich, almost algae-green leaves of spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow’s organs, and champagne-colored grapes with skins as tight as a showgirl’s leotard.
I selected a bunch of thin, bright asparagus. I was able to ask the woman, in comfortable Italian, if I could possibly just take half this asparagus home? There was only one of me, I explained to her—I didn’t need much. She promptly took the asparagus from my hands and halved it. I asked her if I could find this market every day in the same place, and she said, yes, she was here every day, from 7:00 AM. Then her son, who was very cute, gave me a sly look and said, “Well, she tries to be here at seven . . .” We all laughed. This whole conversation was conducted in Italian—a language I could not speak a word of only a few months earlier.
I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I’d picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert—a lovely peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sunlight. For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a
When I realized that the only question at hand was, “How do I define pleasure?” and that I was truly in a country where people would permit me to explore that question freely, everything changed. Everything became . . . delicious. All I had to do was ask myself every day, for the first time in my life, “What would you enjoy doing today, Liz? What would bring you pleasure right now?” With nobody else’s agenda to consider and no other obligations to worry about, this question finally became distilled and absolutely self-specific.
It was interesting for me to discover what I did not want to do in Italy, once I’d given myself executive authorization to enjoy my experience there. There are so many manifestations of pleasure in Italy, and I didn’t have time to sample them all. You have to kind of declare a pleasure major here, or you’ll get overwhelmed. That being the case, I didn’t get into fashion, or opera, or cinema, or fancy automobiles, or skiing in the Alps. I didn’t even want to look at that much art. I am a bit ashamed to admit this, but I did not visit a single museum during my entire four months in Italy. (Oh, man—it’s even worse than that. I have to confess that I did go to one museum: the National Museum of Pasta, in Rome.) I found that all I really wanted was to eat beautiful food and to speak as much beautiful Italian as possible. That was it. So I declared a double major, really—in speaking and in eating (with a concentration on gelato).
The amount of pleasure this eating and speaking brought to me was inestimable, and yet so simple. I passed a few hours once in the middle of October that might look like nothing much to the outside observer, but which I will always count amongst the happiest of my life. I found a market near my apartment, only a few streets over from me, which I’d somehow never noticed before. There I approached a tiny vegetable stall with one Italian woman and her son selling a choice assortment of their produce—such as rich, almost algae-green leaves of spinach, tomatoes so red and bloody they looked like a cow’s organs, and champagne-colored grapes with skins as tight as a showgirl’s leotard.
I selected a bunch of thin, bright asparagus. I was able to ask the woman, in comfortable Italian, if I could possibly just take half this asparagus home? There was only one of me, I explained to her—I didn’t need much. She promptly took the asparagus from my hands and halved it. I asked her if I could find this market every day in the same place, and she said, yes, she was here every day, from 7:00 AM. Then her son, who was very cute, gave me a sly look and said, “Well, she tries to be here at seven . . .” We all laughed. This whole conversation was conducted in Italian—a language I could not speak a word of only a few months earlier.
I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all). I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I’d picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert—a lovely peach, which the woman at the market had given to me for free and which was still warm from the Roman sunlight. For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a
Similar Books
