Seven Pleasures

"Seven Pleasures explores a range of satisfactions to be enjoyed in the everyday life—or, to put it another way, in the no man's land between religion and pharmacology, what Mr. Spiegelman calls the 'twin pillars of the American happiness industry.' Individual chapters focus on his own chief pleasures: reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming and writing . . . To the extent that he has a secret to happiness, it resides in slowing down enough to pay attention to what you might call the grammar of experience. When you take the time to examine the world around you, parsing what you see, hear and feel—Mr. Spiegelman likens the approach to the parsing of a sentence in Latin class—you find that the plainest occurrence is surprisingly rich . . . Taken together, Mr. Spiegelman's essays amount to a kind of cubist memoir, catching the author from different angles. It is unexpectedly fascinating to read a memoir these days in which the author isn't a victim of anything . . . The eighth pleasure the book provides is in the intelligence and grace he brings to the job."—Wes Davis, The Wall Street Journal

"Willard Spiegelman loves to dance, swim, and take long walks, but he is not a performer, athlete, or advocate of avid exercise. These activities simply bring him pleasure, so he indulges in them. For the same reason, he loves to look at art, listen to music, read literature, and write, but is neither a snooty aesthete nor a withdrawn loner. If anything, he is passionate, almost gluttonous in savoring these modest delights, and he wants to reach out so others will know the pleasures they can bring. That impulse to share his enjoyment has resulted in Seven Pleasures, an appropriately entertaining and provocative book . . . [Spiegelman] brings to his writing an intellectual rigor and personal honesty that demonstrate his subjects' vitality, interest, and significance. Seven Pleasures is comprised of equal parts memoir, reflection, observation, and speculation. The more active pleasures, he finds, satisfy by connecting body and mind, bringing together 'doing and feeling' in ways that help block out other concerns . . . His book is both a simple and complex pleasure, slow and swift at once, a graceful meditation on ordinary happiness."—Floyd Skloot, The Boston Globe

"Willard Spiegelman, Hughes professor of English at Southern Methodist University, hearkens back to this earlier tradition in Seven Pleasures: Essays on Ordinary Happiness. This slim book is surprisingly expansive in its range and potential usefulness. Spiegelman notes that he is a relatively happy person, and the seven pleasures he enumerates, one per chapter, have presumably helped make him so. Taking our cue from him, we can read this book as a highly literate how-to for a happier life . . . Spiegelman's book is an attempt to use personal experience to connect both with other writers' experiences and to a larger humanity. As a result, this is a literary book but also an accessible and comforting one to the general reader. All of the pleasures enumerated, with the exception of dancing, are solitary and, as such, can serve as consolation in the face of loss and loneliness. In the end, this discourse on seven pleasures leads one to want an eighth: conversation. Spiegelman, like Samuel Johnson, whom he cites frequently, seems as if he would be a wonderful dinner companion. Proof of a good familiar essay may be that it makes you want to have a conversation with its author—or perhaps to feel as though you have."—Paula Marantz Cohen, The Philadelphia Inquirer

"From Aristotle to the Founding Fathers to this week's hot self-helper, people have always sought to understand and seize happiness. What is it? What produces it? How can we make it last? The happiness literature is voluminous, but thankfully that didn't prevent Willard Spiegelman, the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, from supplying his own answers to the eternal questions. Those answers grow not from lofty theories but from the contentment, and sometimes delight, found in apparently mundane activities. Spiegelman details his personal history with each of these pursuits and, true to his professional calling, gives us a guided tour of what great writers, artists and critics have said about it: Kierkegaard on walking, Byron on swimming, Jane Austen on dancing, and much more . . . The author nicely balances his own cogent observations with those of the famous dead. His chapter titled 'Looking' illustrates this, mixing ideas from Ruskin and Clement Greenberg with his own musings on Edward Hopper's Western Motel . . . Spiegelman notes that with one exception, dancing, these pleasures are best enjoyed alone, as anyone knows who has endured a chattering mob in a too-popular museum exhibit or wondered what, besides tweets, one can compose amid the babble of a Starbucks. He worries about the effects of cellphone-crazed mass culture on the private life of the mind. Many intellectuals would scorn 'ordinary happiness' (and ordinary anything), but Spiegelman sees nothing desirable in existential gloom. He's proof that clear-eyed, secular happiness is possible despite life's inevitable pain. Can we be both smart and happy? By word and deed, this author shows the answer is yes."—Chris Tucker, The Dallas Morning News

"A combination of memoir and meditation, Seven Pleasures is a departure from Prof. Spiegelman's normal scholarly (though always lively and jocund) mode of writing; in it, he reflects upon seven surprisingly accessible activities that install a sense of well-being: dancing, reading, walking, looking, listening, swimming, and writing."—Texas Monthly

"This is a book that will not change the world but should change the people who read it. Which should casut its author rather a lot of pleasure."—Michael Coren, National Post (Canada)

"'Most folks,' Abraham Lincoln observed, 'are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.' By that standard Willard Spiegelman, a professor of English at Southern Methodist University, is an extraordinarily happy man. And we should be equally pleased he's chosen to discourse on the reasons for his happiness in this erudite and spritely collection of essays . . . Inspired by eminent muses like Emerson, Wallace Stevens and Auden, he brings to his task an impressive scope of learning, enriched by broad reading and extensive travel and reflecting a deep appreciation of the visual arts and a love of music. He's uniformly at ease discoursing on the delights (and inevitability) of getting lost strolling the alleyways of Venice, deconstructing an Edward Hopper painting or recalling the joys of browsing the aisles of a dusty used bookstore in his home town of Philadelphia . . . In Seven Pleasures, he's graciously endeavored to help each of us understand how fortunate we, too, can be if we simply allow ourselves to savor our good fortune. That's the inspiriting message of this elegant, delightful work."—Harvey Freedenberg, Shelf Awareness

"The roots of Spiegelman's writing go back to the kind of personal essay pioneered by E.B. White at The New Yorker: The surface of the prose is flawless, and the mind represented by the prose charms its way past all difficulties. Growing up as the child of middle-class Jews in Philadelphia during the postwar era, before the 'ubiquity of television,' Spiegelman learned that he loved to read, and built a career out of that passion. Unlike many academics, he seems pleased with his choice, and in continual pursuit of ways to make his world expand . . . He spends a great deal of time, for instance, looking at paintings, listening to music, and even, in his late middle age, ballroom dancing. The chapters on walking and dancing are Spiegelman at his most E.B. White-ish: observant, keen to describe his own immediate sentiments, and yet somehow preserving, for all the autobiography on display, a certain reticence . . . These essays exude a contagious satisfaction in a thing well-done and well-expressed: indeed, they not only describe what makes Spiegelman happy, but in doing so, they make the reader happy."—Roger Gathman, Austin American-Statesman

"Few happy people write books, but when they do, they confer the blessings of wisdom and their sanguine nature on the unhappy many. I learned so much from Seven Pleasures. I felt that Willard Spiegelman was personally walking me through all the steps necessary to dance the tango of bliss that he has so delightfully mastered."—Edmund White, author of Hotel de Dream

"Spiegelman's Seven Pleasures mounts a gentle and persuasive argument for what years ago would have been called a more civilized life. And it reminds us what we owe ourselves: that attempt to appreciate as fully as possible that we are here, right now, wherever here may be."—Jim Shepard, author of Like You'd Understand, Anyway

"Spiegelman has written a tidy cordial of a book. Like a soigné combination of Don Giovanni and a college dean, he serves his nectar with a sassy, ironic instructiveness. He gets life right."—Wayne Koestenbaum, author of Hotel Theory

"Willard Spiegelman is our invaluably companionable philosopher of normalcy, and we are happy to benefit here from his wisdom, wit, and well-stocked mind."—Phillip Lopate, author of Against Joie de Vivre

"Spiegelman's essays are wonderful advertisements for taking pleasure in the ordinary, and reminders that we're never too old to take dancing or swimming lessons, or to learn to be lost in Venice. A lovely, companionable book."—Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street

"Willard Spiegelman has the secret of happiness. It worked for me and it will work for you. His book is your new best friend."—Raymond Sokolov, author of Fading Feast

"In Seven Pleasures, Willard Spiegelman reminds us that real happiness can be obtained with a radio, a library card, a public pool, and a pair of well-soled shoes. Spiegelman is simply a great essayist."—Mark Oppenheimer, author of Thirteen and a Day

"In this luminous, compelling book, Spiegelman comments on seven activities that can bring us ordinary happiness—reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming, and writing—injecting biographical elements into the universal messages he imparts. First, though, he tries to define, or at least capture the essence of, happiness. 'Happiness,' he observes, 'has received less respect and less serious attention than melancholy.' He notes the American propensity to see happiness as a right and contrasts it with the gloominess of the European mindset. With the exception of dancing, every activity he writes about involves solitude. In the reading chapter, he refers to his generation as 'the last children born before the ubiquity of television'; if watching TV's early, fuzzy images was unpleasant, reading was fun. In the walking chapter, he flees Dallas, his hometown, for London, a city in which walking is normal, not a chore or something to be avoided (Dallas and much of modern America, apart from the older cities of the East and Midwest, are simply too big and, in the case of Dallas, too hot to walk in comfortably). Writing in a leisurely manner, Spiegelman takes time to make his points and, whatever activity he's engaged in at the moment, to be a thoughtful, genial companion."—June Sawyers, Booklist (starred review)

"Some books are easy companions, and this essay collection, in which Spiegelman speaks affectionately of them, can join their ranks. His top seven picks for happiness are reading, walking, looking, dancing, listening, swimming and writing—activities that are free and accessible to anyone with a library card and a pair of comfortable shoes. As old-fashioned, and occasionally charming, as a Lawrence Welk waltz, Spiegelman proclaims his suspicion of new technology that might replace the book and regrets dancing that doesn't involve a partner and a prescribed step. 'To today's sufferers, melancholics, and ordinary neurotics, can we safely say, "Throw out your Prozac, pick up your Wordsworth?" The advice would revolutionize the health industry.' Spiegelman, editor of the Southwest Review and professor of English at Southern Methodist University, is no self-help guru, but he is an intelligent, well-read and kindly soul."—Publishers Weekly