Everyone knows about the Seven Deadly Sins — Pride, Envy, Gluttony, Lust, Wrath, Covetousness, Sloth — but I wonder if alongside them we ought to find a place for what I think of as Enlivening Sins. These are sins, too, but quite minor, rather sweet ones, and instead of knocking a person out of heaven, they make life on earth seem a bit more piquant, a little more heavenly even.
Gluttony, I have no doubt, will bring a person down, not to speak of doing serious damage to his or her wardrobe. But what can be wrong with an occasional brief bout of over-eating: finishing, say, a full pint of butter pecan ice cream, in the carton, while standing up in front of an open refrigerator door? Along with going before the fall, Pride is socially unpleasant; but to feel, inwardly, that one has done a bang-up job of a difficult assignment — how bad can that be? Not very, I should think.
Sloth will put a person out of the running, yet there do seem days when an afternoon nap seems highly sensible policy. When I take a nap I also remind myself that Wallace Stevens spoke of “the necessary laziness of the poet,” a remark in which I find comfort and confirmation, even though, it is true, I have published only a single poem in my life.
The Enlivening Vices are much on my mind, because earlier this week I committed a splendid one. On a Monday afternoon, in the middle of the working day, I went to a movie. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is its name, and I paid a mere $ 2.50 to see it. Full of astonishing spectacle, it presented elegant Chinese women flying over buildings, fighting with swords, riding long-maned ponies through dazzling golden deserts.
Aristotle thought spectacle “the least artistic of all the parts of tragedy and the least to do with the art of poetry,” but I didn’t allow the old Stagirite’s stricture to prevent my enjoying this flick to the max, taking time out to lapse into the briefest of naps. I regret to say that I ate only a single slice of chocolate during the movie; I should have bought a box of Mason Dots. Best of all was emerging from the movie into full sunlight, which reminded me of coming out of the innumerable Saturday afternoon movies of my boyhood.
“A poet [recall my publishing record here] always cheats his boss,” an old Russian proverb has it, and it occurs to me that, as a younger man, on every job I ever had I snuck away in the afternoon at least once to go off to a movie. Often I did so out of frustration, but perhaps just as often for the sheer delicious pleasure of it. The only reason I haven’t done so over the past twenty-five or so years is that I’ve been self-employed. One of the few things I can say against working for oneself is that some of the joy of sneaking out to a movie is lost.
I haven’t made a list of the Enlivening Sins, and I’m not sure there is any need to codify them, as was done with the Deadly ones and the Commandments, though I am glad that there are only seven of the former and ten of the latter. Some enlivening sins that I have committed in recent weeks include taking a pass on an entire Sunday edition of the New York Times, quitting a serious but ill-written book after fifty pages, eating something called a chocolate espresso square an hour before dinner, stopping all work at mid-morning, once to listen to a full CD of Fats Waller songs, another time to one of the songs by the late Charles Trenet. Not exactly Marquis de Sade material, I realize, but one does the best one can. To be enlivening a sin must be occasional, never ending in compulsion, let alone addiction. It ought to have a fine feel of triviality to it, and affect only oneself. It ought to help get one, however briefly, out of one’s regular groove, bringing no serious guilt in its wake. An enlivening sin is a deviation in the direction of mild self-indulgence. Before committing such a sin, one hears a voice within say, “Let’er rip,” but in a whisper.
The only flaw in enlivening sins is that, unlike major sins, they do not allow one to dramatize one’s fall to oneself. Nor is the matter of expiation at all clear. Confession is also a problem, though there is a benign church of my imagining in which a special booth for confession of enlivening sins is perpetually set up.
“And what is your sin, my son?” I hear a priest in this new church ask.
“Forgive me, father, but I watched two college basketball games, back to back, on a Saturday afternoon.”
“You must do it again, my son,” the priest answers, “but not too soon. Meanwhile, for penance, sing three times the lyrics to Louis Prima’s version of “Banana Split for My Baby, A Glass of Plain Water for Me.’ Go in peace.”
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
