The Jonathan Papers

Excerpt

On Taking One's Dessert First

When we were children we used to "happen in" to the kitchen just before luncheon to see what the dessert was to be. This was because at the luncheon table we were not allowed to ask, yet it was advantageous to know, for since even our youthful capacity had its limits, we found it necessary to "save room," and the question, of course, was, how much room?

Discovering some favorite dish being prepared, we used to gaze with watering mouth, and, though knowing its futility, could seldom repress the plea, "Mayn't we have our dessert now?" Of course we never did, of course we waited, and of course, when that same dessert came to us, properly served, at the proper time, after a properly wholesome luncheon preceding, it found us expectant, perhaps, but not eager; appreciative, but not enthusiastic. It was not to us what it would have been at the golden moment when we begged for it.

In hours of unbridled hostility to domestic conditions we used sometimes to plan for a future when we should be grown up, and then would we not change this sorry scheme of things entire! Would we not have a larder, with desserts in it, our favorite desserts—and would we not devour these same, boldly, recklessly, immediately before the meal for which they were intended! Just wouldn't we!

And afterward—just didn't we! Most youthful fancies are doomed to fade unrealized, but this one was too fundamentally practical and sane. We are grown up, we have a larder, with now and then toothsome desserts in it, and now and then we grip our conscience till it cowers and is still, we wait till the servants are out, we walk into our pantry—and then—

Yes, triumphant we still believe what once militant we maintained—that the only way to eat cake is when it is just out of the oven, that the only way to eat ice cream is to dip it out of the freezer, down under the apple tree, in the mid-morning or mid-afternoon. Afterward, when it appears in sober decorum, surrounded by all the appurtenances of civilization, it is a very commonplace affair; out under the apple tree it is ambrosia.

Why not go further? Why not take all our desserts in life when they taste best, instead of at the proper time, when we don't care for them? Desserts are, I suppose, meant to be enjoyed. Why not have them when most enjoyable? I wonder if there is not a certain perverted conscientiousness that leads us to this enforcement of our pleasures. I am myself conscious that I can scarcely ever approach a pleasure with a mind singly bent on enjoyment. I regard it with something like suspicion, I hedge, I hesitate, I defer. What is the motive force here? Is it an inherited asceticism, bidding us beware of pleasure as such? Is it pride, which will not permit us to make unseemly haste toward our desires? Is it a subtle self-gratification, which seeks to add zest, tone, to our delights by postponing them? Is it fear of anticlimax, which makes us save our pleasure for the last thing, that there may be no descent afterward? Certainly the last was the motive in the case of the little boy who, dining out, was given a piece of mince and one of custard pie....