15 March: Boreham on Life's Luxuries

The Life Luxurious
In Lent we are asked to eschew luxuries. But what is a luxury? That is the very pertinent question which, in all the elaborate disquisitions about thrift, simplicity, and austerity, nobody has seriously attempted to answer. But, until that question has been bluntly asked and frankly answered, the discussion will resolve itself into a haze of platitudes, a volley of blank cartridge, a futile beating of the air. The orator who declaims vigorously against the luxurious life pleases everybody but persuades nobody. His denunciations elicit round after round of applause, but they lead to no practical or useful effect. The reasons are simple enough. Smith, Jones, and Robinson listen sympathetically to his eloquence. Smith, who draws a salary of £300 a year, and whose only form of indulgence consists in an occasional visit, with his wife and family, to the cinema, takes it for granted that the speaker is directing his fire upon Jones, who, with an income of £600 a year, is able to fare more sumptuously, dress more elaborately, and take life more easily than he himself can possibly do. But no such thought crosses the mind of Jones. He thinks at once of Robinson who, on a still ampler income, is in the habit of gratifying much more splendid tastes. And so ad infinitum.

The real trouble is more deeply seated. Humanity has an odd trick of regarding its tyrants as its benefactors. And, up to a certain point, our luxuries are undoubtedly tyrannical. Like the Old Man of the Sea in the Arabian Nights Entertainments, we pick them up with a smile, but, afterwards, find it impossible to shake them off. A fresh sensation swims into our ken. It promises us additional pleasure or additional comfort. Its novelty captivates us and we make some sacrifice to acquire it. Six months later the novelty has worn off, and the normal course of life is no more felicitous than it was in the old days before the new contrivance made its appearance. Yet to part with it would appeal to us as a real deprivation. Luxuries of one day become necessities of the next.

Luxury Not Necessarily A Matter Of Money
What, then, is a luxury? Is it, of necessity, a thing that costs money? John Ruskin would indignantly deny it. "To watch the corn grow; to see the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over spade or ploughshare; to read; to think; to love; to pray; these," he declares, "are the things that make men happy." Towards the close of his life, Henry Ryecroft marshalled, in grateful retrospect, all the more joyous experiences he had ever known; and, in doing so, the thing that really amazed him was the fact that the pleasures that had proved most satisfying and most memorable were the pleasures that had come to him without money and without price. His strolls in the country lanes; his long familiar chats with congenial companions; his relish of common foods and simple fruits; his enjoyment of certain books picked up cheaply at a second hand stall; his memories of gorgeous sunsets that transfigured sea and land, of moonlight nights when the fields sparkled with the frost and the river was like a stream of molten silver, of the russet tints of Autumn and the delicate sweetness of Spring; it was a medley of such images that rushed back upon his mind as he took stock of life's lordliest treasure and made him wonder that he had ever wasted his substance on more expensive delectations.

One of the few concrete definitions of a luxury is Mr. Stuart White's. In his "Blazed Trail" he declares boldly that a luxury is the exquisite savour of a pleasant sensation. The most delicious moment in his experience, he adds, was the springing up of a cool breeze towards the close of an insufferably sultry day. "Never," he adds, "have dinners or wines or men or women or talk of books or scenery or adventure or sport or the softest, daintiest refinements of man's invention, given me the half of luxury I drank in from that little breeze." And he goes on to argue that the commonest things—a dash of cool water on the tired wrists; a gulp of hot tea; a warm, dry blanket; a whiff of tobacco; a ray of sunshine—are more really the luxuries of life than all the intricacies and sybaritisms that we buy.

Luxury As A Question Of Appetite
Obviously, therefore, many of our vaunted luxuries are luxuries only in name. We tack them on to the already burdensome paraphernalia of life, not because they afford us genuine satisfaction, but because of a vague suspicion that it is correct, and therefore desirable, to acquire them. It is, as Mr. Gladstone used to affirm with withering scorn, the play of our imitative instinct. Is it not significant that, when we whole-heartedly abandon ourselves to pleasure and repose, we leave all our so-called luxuries behind us? We get away into the solitudes of the bush, or seek some lonely beach; we don old clothes; we spread a tent above our heads; we live on what we ourselves catch and cook; and, with a perceptible inward chuckle, we snap our fingers at civilisation and all its ways. We feel it to be a salutary thing to woo back the simpler appetites.

Is it not possible that we have become like the unhealthy child who, scorning plain, wholesome food, peevishly whimpers for sweets and confectionery? Which is the truer luxury, to pamper his cloyed palate with the trifles that it craves, or to restore to him an appetite that will render him ravenous for simpler and more nutritious food? It may be that the fiery ordeals of these critical times[1] will eventually teach us that the luxuries of life lurk among its simplicities, and that, as existence becomes less complex, it may, at the same time, become more delightful. After all, there is no valid reason for excluding our own era from the application of that greatest sermon ever preached—the Sermon on the Mount—with its dramatic contrast between the elaborate but minor happiness of Solomon in all his glory and the simpler but major felicity of the creatures of the wild.

F W Boreham

[1] This editorial appears in the Hobart Mercury on 15 March, 1947, and is perhaps a reference to "the fiery ordeals" of the Second World War.