It was surprising to me, even though it shouldn’t have been surprising, to realize that the things that move one person don’t necessarily move another person much. Considering this, I could, of course, make a list of my own deficiencies, my own lacks in “sensibility,” as Jane Austen used the term (when crafting the character of Marianne Dashwood). I have plenty of gaps in sensibility, myself.
First and foremost, I lack emotional susceptibility to visual art. I’m aware of it. It’s a personal failing. Stand me in front of a painting by Gerhard Richter or Grandma Moses and . . . eh. I mean, I can definitely feel a bit of something coming off the canvas. Paintings and sculptures often pique my interest from a cultural history point of view. Standing in the gallery not in silence, but chattering away about it — as I do also during movies, to the annoyance of my companions in art appreciation — I enjoy pondering the art piece, whatever it is, as a relic of a particular moment in time. Wondering about the coiffure of the person who made it, and what they wore, and trying to imagine how their art studio was decorated, and what the conversation was like when they drank gin or absinthe or Hu-Kwa around a small cafe table with good friends. I can truthfully say a Turner scene of the Thames, circa 1775, is pretty and evokes a mild wistfulness, but do I honestly get a powerful emotional charge from the artwork itself? Not really, if I’m honest. Not anything nearly as strong as I get from a great book (Vladimir Nabokov’s “Speak, Memory”), a great movie (“Apocalypse Now” threw me into a sweat for a month), or a great rock-and-roll song “(White Man in Hammersmith Palais” by the Clash could turn me into a bank robber).
Other people do get strong emotions from looking at paintings, apparently. Unless all these appreciators of modern art are lying about it?
In a tangentially similar vein, I was surprised to realize that other people were surprised — my friends and exes — by how important flowers are to me, emotionally speaking. Apparently not everyone gets much of anything off of flowers. Can that be true?
It’s so pretentious — kind of unforgivably pretentious — to declare, “Flowers are essential to me.” I would give a strong, scornful side eye to someone else making that privileged-sounding, princess-y claim. But in point of fact, flowers are indeed essential to me, and I get strong emotional, erm, well, resonance off of them. I do need to have flowers in my house all year round, or I suffer. It’s like a vitamin deficiency. I get wan and lethargic. I get crabby. I’m less fun.
Not having the disposable income to supply myself reliably with flowers from the florist shop, and being too lazy when it comes to physical labor to supply myself reliably with cut flowers from my own back garden, I resort to a tad bit of low-level criminality to get my flower fix. If a friend says, “Help yourself to daffodils,” I overdo it and pop a huge yellow armload of bobbing sunshine into the back of my Honda before the friend has quite noticed what I’ve done. If a neighbor has mentioned they will be out of town for the entirety of the month of July, it’s within the realm of the possible that you might spy me sauntering casually over the property line with secateurs in hand some evening at twilight, half-pretending to be looking for a lost dog. I cut ivy off power poles to add greenery to arrangements and am keenly aware of the location of certain cherry trees in quasi-public spaces that have fallen into neglect.
Right now, it is the hyacinth moment. I get a lot off a hyacinth. The hyacinth is the purple expression of the seasonal mini-mania I experience each spring as soon as the clocks have sprung forward. The hyacinth is incredibly forceful. It is an amethyst worn on the ring of a superhero. It is a contralto. I suppose this is a form of synesthesia; again, at the risk of coming across as insufferably pretentious, I do definitely have a neurological case of synesthesia.
(As an adolescent, at the age of 12, I discovered I could pull a special party trick out of my pocket to perform for new acquaintances at summer camp: I’d describe each kid’s essence in color and texture after sitting with them for a while. Antonia, for example, was satin in texture, like a ribbon, but while you might expect her color to be a wine, or maroon, she was in fact that palest yellow, so pale it was almost an acid-greenish white. I’d sit and think and consider for a while, like Miss Cleo the television psychic, then make my pronouncement, and the other kids sitting expectantly beside me on a bench made of logs outside the dining hall would nod their heads in solemn acknowledgement of the truth of the satin and the acid-white. I didn’t have the word “synesthesia” yet, but that’s what this was.)
There are few things nicer in life than having the most exciting flower days ahead, coming toward you in a parade, like dancers and drum majorettes: Here are the happy yellow daffodils (who are in fact, it must be admitted, only so happy because they are fools), and then come the lush lilacs, the shadblow, the apricot-colored roses, the Nikko Blue hydrangeas . . . all the way until the final fanfare of late-October dahlias, big as pie plates, their song as bittersweet as “Czardas” on the Hungarian Romani violin.