The Fresh and the Stale
Ruminations on synergies, hedonic depletion and love in old age
In this blog, I keep circling around the topic of hedonic depletion and how to combat it—like a vulture around a Tower of Silence, but without ever really getting my beak into the carcass of it. Hedonic depletion is the idea that things grow stale after repeated encounters and that each time you experience a thing the pleasure is fainter than before.
There is undoubtedly a unique freshness that comes with just-out-of-the-wrapper newness that can never be rediscovered, it’s true. But then there are things that seem resistant to this phenomenon, that do not lose their appeal even on the thousandth iteration: the first flat white of the morning, just cool enough to sip, temporarily giving me a pencil moustache as debonair as Errol Flynn’s; the feel of Cookie’s fluffy ringleted head and silky ears; the sound of driving rain, calming white noise lulling me to sleep. These things can even make you feel connected to something infinite, something universal: as the old song goes, you feel like it’s raining all over the world.
The Second Law of thermodynamics governs everything in our universe: everything fades, degrades, fractures, washes away. I think of it as producing a kind of osmotic gradient of time: the further you get from the the first occurrence of something, the more dilute the pleasure it contains. And yet the joy in certain things seems to persist in a way that feels almost indestructible—so much so that if you find they no longer make you happy, you are liable to ask yourself if you are depressed. The problem has got to be with your mental state—rather than with your humdrum familiarity with the things themselves.
This isn’t always good, of course. You can’t taste just one Cinnabon—at least, I can’t. I’ve eaten those gooey pillowy rounds of dough slathered in icing sweet enough to coat my teeth with fur dozens of times. I know what they taste like: surely that knowledge should inoculate me; surely my body should have produced some antibodies against that smell—a smell that I know is an unholy combination of unpronounceable artificial chemicals, pumped out in invisible clouds. But yet, if I’m strolling through a brightly-lit American shopping mall or wheeling my suitcase through the endless corridors of an international airport and I come upon that familiar scent, I have only two options: flight or surrender. There is a key escape window in which I have to run or I will inexorably find myself sticky-fingered and burping up icing nine hundred calories later. The pleasure of the Cinnabon itself is of a kind that depletes perceptibly, in real time, as I eat it, but unless I’m running a high fever or have just returned from an eight-course banquet—and perhaps not even then—the first bite never loses its appeal.
And then there are natural synergies that help to keep pleasure more keenly alive: senses that don’t interfere with each other but are mutual intensifiers. My old friend Janice Wang—a tango dancer, neuropsychologist and oenophile—has done a number of studies of the ways in which your visual and aural environment affect the tastes of certain foods, with a view to discovering how we can highlight certain flavours for maximum gustatory pleasure. Conversation can be one of those things that highlights flavour, I feel. Have you noticed how often, when people are eating an especially delicious meal, they start recounting stories of other delicious meals from the past? You would think that the memory of a different set of tastes would detract from the experience of the moment—and yet, it doesn’t. We can be in more than one moment at once: we can savour different layers of time all at once, as if eating a millefeuille of memory.
Some things resonate in such a way as to increase each other’s amplitude—in sometimes counterintuitive ways. I once took a long walk through a forest in the Schwäbishe Alb with my then boyfriend. We spent the several hours of the hike discussing George Eliot’s epic novel Daniel Deronda, set amid English countryside, fashionable resorts, Jewish ghettos and gambling dens. Afterwards, he expressed concern that we might have missed out on the full experience of the lush greenery amid which we had been walking. But in fact, though that walk took place in 1992, I remember those trees more vividly than almost any others I’ve ever walked through.
In 2017, I spent several months travelling regularly across the Indian city of Pune by rickshaw and obsessively listening to The Carpenters as I went. Now, that music is indelibly associated for me with the cheery bumblebee colours of the rickshaw and the chaos of mopeds swerving around us. Female riders wore long scarves tied around their heads and faces against the diesel-scented air—at first, I took them all for veiled Muslim women, but these were Hindus. I only have to hear “Close to You,” “Top of the World” or—my favourite—“We’ve Only Just Begun” to visualise the tanned feet of the rickshaw driver in his worn-down sandals, the black and white stripes of the ubiquitous concrete barriers, the lush foliage of banyan, peepul, neem and mango trees lining the roads, the pot-bellied Ganesh figure swaying gently from its perch on the dashboard.
When I’m thinking and writing about experiences long past, it feels a bit like reading a novel—although the subject matter is my own life. I can become very immersed in a book, but never totally. It’s only a metaphorical immersion: it’s not tangibly wet. Taste and smell and—for me at least—the vividness of colour are absent and, while I can remember them enough to put words to them, to assign the right vocabulary, I can’t really recreate the feeling itself. But oddly, that doesn’t make it any less meaningful. It’s no longer experience in the raw: it’s experience transformed into thought, into the at best rather vague and blurry furniture of my mind palace. But that just makes it all the more meaningful. It means that I’ve taken what the world threw out and made it mine.
Perhaps love can accrete meaning like that too. In a very long relationship, in which you’ve known each other for decades, the keenness of desire for each other, the bliss of holding each other tenderly, the appeal of seeing a beautiful, fresh face—all those things may have gone. You can lose touch with the sense of what the other person means to you just as you can lose the ability to smell your own favourite perfume—although you know it’s there, daubed behind your ears, ready to surprise and delight a friend when she leans in for a hug.
I’ve never had a love that lasted that long, but there’s still a chance I could. And lately, I’ve been daydreaming of an ancient lover, imagining the feel of his crepey skin splodgy with sunspots, the spindliness of his legs and the droop of his belly, the slight tremor of his hands and the involuntary groans he makes as he heaves himself up out of a low-slung sofa. I hope and dream that, twenty years from now, in my own decrepitude, I’ll have a lover like that. And we’ll have been together for so long that I barely notice his presence, barely register his superficial characteristics—not because I don’t love him. But precisely because he’s become so inextricably entwined with me, he’s too close to see, but all the more meaningful for it.