Temperance

Temperance gives enjoyment with a recognizable shape

The food hall has six desserts you would like to meet. Your tray has room for one, and your afternoon has already included lunch. You choose the little pear tart and sit where you can taste it. Across the aisle, the other five remain spectacularly available to other people. The city can keep a few possibilities for another day.

Finding the balance in Temperance

Choose one dessert from an abundant market display and give it your attention.

An appetite can offer useful information without setting the whole plan. Choice lets a particular pleasure become enough for this occasion.

What Temperance makes possible

A chosen pleasure can become more memorable when it receives enough attention to register. You begin to notice the pastry, the conversation or the small performance itself. The city’s abundance becomes a field of possibilities you can return to, with some room left in the afternoon for surprise.

Temperance in ordinary life

An evening of events

Choose the performance you most want to hear and allow time to arrive without rushing between several venues.

A beautiful shop window

Enjoy the arrangement and colors before deciding whether anything belongs in your home.

Nearby virtues, different work

Self-Command

Self-Command restrains a particular harmful impulse; Temperance shapes the place appetite has in your choices over time.

Gratitude

Gratitude receives the good already present; Temperance helps keep the next invitation from immediately displacing it.

Temperance and its counterfeits

A rule against pleasure

Making every treat suspect counterfeits Temperance through unnecessary deprivation. Give worthwhile enjoyment a deliberate place.

Completion as enjoyment

Trying everything merely to finish the list lets acquisition displace Temperance. Ask what you actually want to experience.

How to cultivate Temperance

1. Choose what you would most like to enjoy.

2. Give that choice time to register before adding another.

3. Leave some attractive possibilities for another occasion.

Try it today

Choose one ordinary pleasure in a shared place and give it your attention. Let the unchosen possibilities remain available without making them unfinished business.

Questions worth returning to

• What would make this pleasure feel fully experienced?
• Am I choosing another thing because I want it or because it is there?

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. There is no covetousness in all this. I am conscious of no yearnings for unattainable things. On the contrary, I am astonished at the number of things I can do without.

   A. G. Gardiner · Many Furrows · On Shop Windows

   Gardiner has discovered the pleasure of looking in shop windows. The display can be enjoyed without turning every attractive object into a purchase we must make.

2. It was the associations of the food that made it memorable.

   A. G. Gardiner · Many Furrows · The Cult of the Knife and Fork

   Gardiner is recalling Hazlitt’s meals alongside books, conversation and travel. The food belongs to an enjoyable occasion; it need not crowd every other part of the occasion out.

3. It is the fate of such an one to take twice as much trouble as is needed to obtain happiness, and miss the happiness in the end; he is the man of the proverb, in short, who goes further and fares worse.

   Robert Louis Stevenson · Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers · Walking Tours

   Stevenson is describing an overwalker who goes so far that the evening’s pleasures are lost. The sentence gives moderation its positive purpose: keeping enough capacity to enjoy what we came for.

4. There was pleasure in eating strawberries, before they became quite common—in the first dish of peas, while they were yet dear—to have them for a nice supper, a treat.

   Charles Lamb · Elia and The Last Essays of Elia · Old China

   In “Old China,” Bridget remembers the pleasure of an occasional dish of strawberries or peas. Her recollection gives a treat its scale: a chosen thing enjoyed distinctly, rather than abundance barely noticed.

5. Now, I have always held that there may be, and that there unquestionably is, such a thing as use without abuse, and that therefore the total abolitionists are irrational and wrong-headed.

   Charles Dickens · The Uncommercial Traveller · XXXVII, A Plea for Total Abstinence

   Dickens makes this distinction in a satire about a temperance procession whose horses are overloaded. The irony exposes moderation that ignores its actual effects. A limit should preserve worthwhile enjoyment while considering what that enjoyment asks of others.

6. I rode through a piece of woods for a hundred rods the other evening, and heard the katydids by myriads—very curious for once; but I like better my single neighbor on the tree.

   Walt Whitman · Complete Prose Works · Specimen Days, Locusts and Katy-dids

   Whitman compares a mass of insect song with the single singer near his window. More of an enjoyable thing is not automatically the form we will enjoy most.

7. We forget how new the modern city is, and how short the span of time in which we have assumed that we can eliminate public provision for recreation.

   Jane Addams · The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets · Youth in the City

   Addams questions a city that organizes work but neglects play. Temperance needs a positive place for pleasure: worthwhile recreation should be available and enjoyed, rather than treated only as a temptation to resist.

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