21
Sometimes I wonder what I’m doing here, I admit it.
While I have come to Italy in order to experience pleasure, during the first few weeks I was
here, I felt a bit of panic as to how one should do that. Frankly, pure pleasure is not my cultur-
al paradigm. I come from a long line of superconscientious people. My mother’s family were
Swedish immigrant farmers, who look in their photographs like, if they’d ever even seen
something pleasurable, they might have stomped on it with their hobnailed boots.(My uncle
calls the whole lot of them “oxen.”) My father’s side of the family were English Puritans, those
great goofy lovers of fun. If I look on my dad’s family tree all the way back to the seventeenth
century, I can actually find Puritan relatives with names like Diligence and Meekness.
My own parents have a small farm, and my sister and I grew up working. We were taught
to be dependable, responsible, the top of our classes at school, the most organized and effi-
cient babysitters in town, the very miniature models of our hardworking farmer/nurse of a
mother, a pair of junior Swiss Army knives, born to multitask. We had a lot of enjoyment in my
family, a lot of laughter, but the walls were papered with to-do lists and I never experienced or
witnessed idleness, not once in my whole entire life.
Generally speaking, though, Americans have an inability to relax into sheer pleasure. Ours
is an entertainment-seeking nation, but not necessarily a pleasure-seeking one. Americans
spend billions to keep themselves amused with everything from porn to theme parks to wars,
but that’s not exactly the same thing as quiet enjoyment. Americans work harder and longer
and more stressful hours than anyone in the world today. But as Luca Spaghetti pointed out,
we seem to like it. Alarming statistics back this observation up, showing that many Americans
feel more happy and fulfilled in their offices than they do in their own homes. Of course, we all
inevitably work too hard, then we get burned out and have to spend the whole weekend in our
pajamas, eating cereal straight out of the box and staring at the TV in a mild coma (which is
the opposite of working, yes, but not exactly the same thing as pleasure). Americans don’t
really know how to do nothing. This is the cause of that great sad American stereotype—the
overstressed executive who goes on vacation, but who cannot relax.