4. Scheherazade’s Fourth Lesson: The Root of Story Is Pleasure
Forget all of your existing ideas about what books, films and stories are ‘good’ and which are not so. Forget all your preconceived notions of what constitutes good taste. If pleasure was your only guide, what would you read, what would you watch? Note down your choices in your Book of Wonder. Be entirely honest!
Then examine your choices. How different are those books and films from the ones you usually read and watch? And what do these stories all have in common? Do they suggest that something is lacking in your life?
5. Scheherazade’s Fifth Lesson: Wonder Comes at the Price of Certainty
Write down three statements about aspects of your personality that matter a great deal to you. For example: ‘I am loyal’.
Then find episodes from your life that run counter to that.
The Seventh Key
Senses of Wonder
We catch glimpses of our soul in the thick foliage of our senses.
Philip ‘the Good’, Duke of Burgundy, was not one for half measures. He had eighteen illegitimate children that we know of, established one of the most splendid courts of the late Middle Ages, and, when he married Isabella of Portugal, he marked the occasion by creating nothing less than a whole new chivalric order (the Order of the Golden Fleece, named after the ram’s pelt sought by the Greek hero Jason and his Argonauts). He saw it as his sacred duty to launch a crusade to take back Constantinople from the Ottomans, who had conquered the city in 1453. To rally the support he needed, he held a magnificent feast. On 17 February 1454, he threw the party to end all parties.
Each course consisted of no fewer than forty-eight dishes, lowered from the ceiling on three tables of increasing size. The tables were laden with more than the choicest of foodstuffs. On the shortest one was a forest through which animals and human characters seemed to move of their own accord. On the next table, where the duke himself sat, was a church with four singers and an organ and a fountain in the shape of a child peeing rose-water. On the last table, the longest one, were crammed twenty-eight musicians, a castle encircled by a moat of orange water and containing the figure of Melusine (a water spirit who could take the shape of a serpent) in a tower, a windmill, and a desert in which, among other things, a remarkably realistic tiger did battle with a snake.
Once the guests had sat down (after entering through five different doors, each guarded by an archer), the church bell rang, and the singers started singing. Then a horse made an entrance, walking backwards. He was caparisoned in red, and on his back were two trumpet players. After the horse came a wild boar, clad in green. Riding the boar was a man, dressed half as a human and half as a griffin. A second man was doing a handstand on the shoulders of the first.
This was just the warm-up act. Now that the audience’s attention had been captured, a play was performed based on Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece. It featured yet more music from the trumpeters, a young child riding on a beautiful hind, a fire-breathing dragon that could actually fly, the slaying of a monstrous serpent, and a battle between soldiers who sprang from the serpent’s teeth.
After these diversions, the main business of the evening could finally begin. A huge, armed brute entered the room, dragging behind him a captive elephant on whose back stood a castle. Inside the castle stood a lady dressed in white and wrapped in a black cloak. She represented the Church; the brute was a stand-in for the Saracens. When the lady asked for protection from the brute, a small army of heralds burst in, bearing a gold-collared pheasant, which they presented to the duke. They asked him to swear on it to save and protect the Church.
Philip the Good, being good, didn’t have a heartbeat’s hesitation. He wrote down his solemn oath on parchment. He swore that he would fight the sultan mano-a-mano, if push came to shove. Who was with him?
It was an unqualified triumph. So many people started writing down their oaths that Philip had to ask his guests to postpone the deluge of piousness until the next day, so that the party could go on. As a thank-you token, God sent the twelve Virtues, in the form of twelve young women, to join in the revelry. And people danced, and drank, and ate, and made merry until late into the night.
The crusade never happened; the feast, however, went down in history.1
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This is the story that has been passed down by the chroniclers. But there is another story here, one that we can work out for ourselves – a story of sensuousness. This story starts with candles: the late medieval aristocracy would have used candles made of beeswax, which gives off a scent that is subtle but distinctive. Thus, even the light in that dining hall was scented, a gentle base note for the much stronger aromas vying for attention. In those days people did not wash as often as we do today, and they made liberal use of perfumes and powders. The intensity of all those scents combined would have been more than enough to put us off our food – even before the horse and the boar and the elephant brought their feral bouquet into the closed and crowded room.
None of this, however, spoiled the appetite of Philip’s guests, who were happy to gorge on the sequence of heavily spiced courses. Heavily coloured too: medieval cooks used every trick imaginable to make their dishes bright and appealing to the eye. The richness of the colours on display – from fabrics, food and the pageant of entertainments – must have been astounding.
And the tactile appeal, too. Think of the warmth the guests must have felt on their skin, the warmth of candles, fire and people, so different from the clinical dry warmth given off by modern-day radiators. Think of the clothes they wore, heavier than ours, and made of natural fibres. Think of the wood on which they sat, sculpted by hand, irregular. Everything was handmade, no two things (no two chairs, no two benches, no two tables) were the same; everything they touched was new, with its own shape and quirks. The tactile experience enjoyed day in day out by these fifteenth-century nobles offered a level of variety that we would struggle to imagine.
I wonder how it felt to sit down, in rich clothes, on a chair whose shape you could not anticipate exactly, surrounded by other people wearing similarly rich apparel, eating foodstuffs of vivid hue, and watching, by the flicker of candlelight, a tiger that seemed to be real but was not so, and a boar that was definitely real and came wrapped in green silk. This visual splendour was augmented by music and song, by the speaking of lines of the play, and the voices of Burgundian noblemen steadily working their way towards intoxication.
The world has changed: as we have found at different stages of our journey, while some things have been gained, others have been lost. Our senses have been diminished to a saddening extent.
A soirée like the Feast of the Pheasant would be impossible to put together today. Insanely wealthy people are still throwing insanely hedonistic parties, but there is no escaping the fact that we have dulled our senses with neglect. At all levels of wealth, in all social classes, a certain intensity of experience has just disappeared. It would take a long and expensive sommelier training to gain just a fraction of the sensual awareness my peasant grandfather had for wine and the food that accompanied it.
We are afraid of touching and being touched, we are suspicious of unfamiliar smells, easily repelled by flavours that are too heady, too robust, too bitter, too spicy: in order to sanitize our world, we have reined in our senses. They have become dull and predictable – and so have our lives. To seize our seventh and last key, we are going to rewild them.