One of the subscriber features here at Close Reads HQ is Heidi White’s monthly column in which she explores a theme that is near and dear to her heart (as longtime listeners of the show might know): the way duty and desire show up in literature. Each month she will be writing about how that idea is revealed in the work we are discussing on the podcast. Here is the fourth edition.
Above the antique cabinet that houses my collection of barware and serving dishes hangs a hand-painted sign that reads, “We Always Drink Champagne at 2 pm.” The maxim was born from the union of two of life’s great pleasures: books and conversations. One golden summer when our children were small, my best friend and I spent a month in Cape Cod where we gloried in both, reading stacks of novels and essays and poetry, spending hours talking about everything under (and beyond) the sun while the little ones dug for fiddler crabs, constructed fairy gardens, and hunted for piping plover’s eggs.
That summer I read Brideshead Revisited, which stirred in me a longing for an elusive and unnameable joy that was evoked by Charles Ryder’ defiance against a stoic and ineffectual appeal to renounce his Oxford pleasure. “I usually have a glass of champagne about this time,” he says, “Will you join me?” This thrilled me. I would text it every day to Emily and we would jaunt off together, children in tow, to discover the richest, creamiest clam chowder south of Boston or to unearth the giant horseshoe crabs buried like primeval monsters in shallow inlets of the sea. Very often we would tuck our flushed and sleepy small fry into bed for an afternoon nap and drink champagne in crystal flutes while we talked or read in the garden, cardinals darting like flashes of flame above the blooming roses and overgrown poplars.
That whole month felt like a gratuitous and effervescent glass of champagne at the usually dull hour of 2:00 pm. Like Charles in his summer at Brideshead, “I felt a whole new system of nerves alive within me.” Through it, I recognized that, although we will never truly imbibe the fullness of joy in this life, still at times we can taste something like it in small doses, something invigorating and extravagant that whets the appetite for eternity.
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