I buy a lot of wine. I don’t drink a lot of wine, but I buy a lot of wine. Give me a couple bottles of the 2019 Ciacci Piccolomini Pianrosso Brunello di Montalcino or the 2022 Domaine de Chevalier Rouge (or Blanc, I’m not picky) and I am thrilled to stack them up on my “Tuscany” and “Bordeaux” shelves, as I patiently wait for the optimal drinking window (2035 for the Brunello, 2050 for the Passac-Leognan).
In my mind, I am piling up future experiences. It brings me joy to look at the bottles in my collection and imagine how beautiful they will be in 15 years and what a wonderful experience it will be to follow their journeys through time as they (and I) continue to age.
This seems somewhat reasonable. I see wine as one of the purest forms of art. The ability to preserve a vision of a particular place at a singular moment in time is what art is all about, in my opinion, and I think wine does it better than any other medium. Wine allows an artist to literally bottle up the moment and preserve it for the future, and that’s a beautiful thing.
The problem is that my joy in collecting wine is almost entirely conceptual. While actually drinking great wine is something I enjoy, how often have I looked through my collection and found a number of decent wines that are ready to drink and thought, “but I’ve been holding onto this for three years, I can’t just open it today!” To me, the joy of drinking the wine would be outweighed by the agony of losing the opportunity to have the experience in the future. I am, as Warren Buffet would say, saving up sex for old age.
This is a problem, and I’m not the only one who has it. It seems that our society is steadily forgetting how to actually experience joyful experiences. As we gain the ability to preserve and share our moments of joy through cameras and social media, that joy seems to come more and more from the process of preservation than from the experience itself.
When I watch the Dodgers, I often notice the people behind home plate. These fans have the rare privilege of watching Shohei Ohtani at bat from just a few feet away, and many of them stare at the entire scene through their phones as they record it. Imagine the agony these would-be videographers would feel if they filmed his home run – the whole thing! perfectly in focus! – only to realize that they forgot to press the record button. The agony of merely experiencing the experience.
I recently read a fantastic book on the psychology of hoarders [Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things]. The people profiled in this book have homes filled to the brim with magazines, clothes, and broken trinkets. When asked about their collections, they speak about their items with joy. They find comfort in having access to all the information in the old newspapers (which they have never and will never read), or spare parts in the old toy (which are broken and could never be used).
The items are not useful, but preserving some imagined future utility brings a sense of joy. Removing that future value (i.e. by throwing something away so they can open the front door) brings unbearable agony. Of course, this is irrational, as the hoarding often harms their quality of life and makes the experience of living in clutter anything but joyful. Yet, we all seem to be willing to make that same tradeoff in our own ways.
Why?
It’s about time. When faced with the knowledge that life is finite and even the best experiences are temporary, we seek hopelessly to preserve them. This is an understandable reaction, but it is about as effective as trying to save a delicious meal for next year; it goes unenjoyed today and tomorrow it will be rotten. Lose/lose.
At some level, this is why I paint. Artists are immortal. Stand before a great painting and it feels as if the artist’s very spirit is preserved in the canvas. Picasso isn’t dead, I saw him at the Met not too long ago, fully embedded in The Girl Before the Mirror. If I infuse my life in a painting, it can be preserved. This is only a slightly more laborious version of the same delusion that compels a parent to view their child’s birthday party through a camera lens.
I even have come to wonder whether, maybe, missing the experience is the goal? There’s a point in every wine collector’s journey where they realize they are buying wine primarily for their own funeral. It’s a joke, but maybe that’s actually the whole idea? Like a debt rolled over in perpetuity, if we can delay the joy of experiencing something beautiful, we can delay the sadness of it being gone, too. Knowing that the kid’s 5th birthday will never come back, we hide, we save it for another day through photos, because to experience it means to lose it forever.
Every spring, I wait for the star jasmine to bloom in my garden. The flowers are so gentle and hopeful and the aromas so intense as they waft in through the windows. I feel a sense of agony because I cannot save this experience. I am aware of the ten thousand ways in which this could be the very last time these flowers and I exist in the same time and place. The more I appreciate this moment, the more it hurts.
The spiritual people tell you that you should be more present, but what they don’t tell you is that presence is agony. To be with something, to truly experience it, is to recognize that it is already gone.
“That it will never come again is what makes life so sweet,” says Emily Dickinson, yes, but also what makes it so bitter.
Last week I went to a Dodger game for the first time. I took plenty of pictures. But since I had already written the above, I would never be able to live with myself if I took out my phone when Shohei came to the plate. I subconsciously reached for it, yes, but I made the decision to be fully absorbed in the experience. So, I watched. The meditation in his stance. The hush of the crowd. The careful tension in the pitcher’s delivery. The crack of his bat. The tiny glistening orb that seemed unreasonably slow and lazy as it floated off into the center field bleachers. The flickering stadium lights. The slow trot around the bases. The sunflower seeds from Teo. I don’t have a video and I cannot share it with you or relive it from my camera roll. That 51st home run was followed by the 55th the next week. This season ended. This particular team is forever just a memory. But I was there and it was beautiful.
