At first, I thought it had something to do with Gerald Sussman’s The Official Sex Manual — a delightful spoof of the sexual-behaviour books that proliferated in the late fifties and early sixties. Subtitled Ά Modern Approach to the Art and Techniques of Coginus’, Sussman’s book contains drawings of a fully-clothed man and a fully-clothed woman with arrows pointing to seventy-five ‘Erroneous Zones of the Male Partner’ and one hundred and eighty-seven ‘Erroneous Zones of the Female Partner’ listed as ‘the nubis vivaldi, the groppa, the umbril, the umbrilla, the Ventis Labora, the Isle of Blumberg, the pons minorca, the pons majorca, Portnoy’s glands, Strindberg’s Straits’, etc.
It turned out that the ‘Erroneous Zones’ in this case had nothing to do with sex but contained valuable advice by the author, psychotherapist Wayne W. Dwyer, on how to cope with the emotional strains of modern living. Apparently Dwyer underwent oral surgery without an anaesthetic and felt no pain by fantasizing erotic images and recalling positive things in his life. Dwyer says you must try not to deny yourself anything in life unless it is absolutely necessary — and it rarely is.
Another point he makes is that nothing is more important than anything else. The child collecting seashells is not doing something more right or wrong than the president of General Motors making a corporate decision.
‘Always live in the present,’ Dwyer advises, ‘and live each moment fully. Prisoners of war survived in the most terrible circumstances. Their secret was learning to appreciate the small things that made up their daily existence — a tiny crust of bread, sunrise from a cell window.’
After reading this I said to myself: ‘By Jove, this fellow is absolutely right. Why should I worry about anything when a few decades hence I and most of the people I know will be dead anyway, and a few billion years hence the sun will become a red giant and fry the earth to a frizzle and nobody will care about inflation, the high price of bananas or what happens in post-Mao China any more.’
I decided to follow Dwyer’s advice immediately and instead of taking two aspirins to relieve a splitting headache, I went to bed and conjured up visions of myself in an oriental harem tended hand and foot by the winners of the Miss Universe contest from 1965 to 1976 inclusive, plus Candice Bergen, Linda Lovelace and Maria Schneider. I fell asleep just as Miss Universe of 1972 was slipping a muscatel grape into my mouth, and in the morning my headache was gone.
When I tried to run my bath and discovered the hot water system had collapsed, I did not fret. I went down to the basement and drew simple joy from the iridescent patterns on the puddle of fuel oil that had formed around the leaky burner.
With a happy heart I decided to give the office a miss. Instead, I drove to the beach at Rafina and spent the entire morning building sand-castles, firm in the knowledge that what I was doing was neither more nor less important than answering the mail or attending business conferences. On the way back I sped along the road, feeling the fresh autumn air rushing past the open car window and relishing the warm scents of the countryside. I smiled at the traffic cop who stopped me and admired his beautiful handwriting as he wrote out the ticket.
Throwing self-denial to the winds, I went to an expensive restaurant for lunch, for starters tucked into a huge plate of spaghetti and followed this up with one of those schnitzels that come with cheese and ham and a fried egg on top. I washed it all down with two bottles of ice-cold beer and ended the meal with a bowl of profiteroles crowned with whipped cream. The guilt complex that would have accompanied such self-indulgence at any other time was simply not there. I was possessed by a feeling of absolute well-being and contentment. The effects on my waistline were a thing of the future and I was living in the present and living each moment fully — in more senses than one.
The future, however, caught up with me pretty quickly in the form of acute indigestion. This was soon dismissed with a hefty dose of bicarbonate of soda and a nap under a tree during which I took up where I had left off with Miss Universe of 1972.
On my return home I listened to the shrill barrage of questions that greeted me and marveled at the capacity of the human voice to convey so accurately sounds of anger, concern, indignation, exasperation and, in the end, to be silenced so utterly and completely by the news that I had spent the morning building sand-castles at Rafina.
As I write this from my bed in a clinic which has barred windows and padded walls, I sometimes wonder why it is that I am no longer allowed to enjoy life to the full as I was doing for about two weeks before I ended up here. But I cast such thoughts aside. They belong to the past and I live only for the present. Soon, the sun will rise and I shall watch it casting its rays through the bars of my window with sheer and blissful joy in my heart.
