Dilettante

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The following quote that I came across quite by chance struck me simply because it seemed to reflect me quite as a mirror does. “I am nothing but a dilettante, a dilettante in painting, in poetry, in music, and several others of the so-called unprofitable arts. Above all else I am a dilettante in life. Up to the present I have lived as I have painted and written poetry. I never got far beyond the preparation, the plan, the first act, the first stanza. There are people like that who begin everything and never finish anything. I am such a one.”

The self-description belongs to the Austrian writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch from whose name came the word ‘masochism’. The writer was certainly not chuffed with that coinage contributed by an Austrian psychiatrist who justified it saying, “I feel justified in calling this sexual anomaly ‘Masochism’ because the author Sacher-Masoch frequently made this perversion, which up to his time was quite unknown to the scientific world as such, the substratum of his writings.” Masochism is the derivation of gratification from one’s own pain or humiliation.

I don’t enjoy pains at all though I have had to endure quite a lot of that because of my personality characteristics. It is those characteristics that make me similar to Sacher-Masoch and not what the psychologist fabricated out of his name. Dilettantism. That is what I share with the writer.

I am a floater by nature. Like the butterfly that goes from flower to flower savouring the honey. The butterfly doesn’t stop to look at the flower beyond the honey. The sorrows of the flower don’t become the pains of the butterfly. Nor are the joys taken. The dilettante takes just what he wants to take.

Dilettantism is an integral part of the butterfly’s DNA. The little creature is incapable of asking something like, “My darling rose, won’t you tell me your sorrow so that I can kiss it away?”

My cats do the same to me. They come and go as they please. When it pleases him, Bobby jumps on to my lap and lies there purring. He can go to sleep there without ever bothering to ask me whether I am free to let him do that. But, on the other hand, if I pick him up and put him in my lap in a moment of pet-ernal affection, he will protest and jump out. Bobby is an absolute dilettante. His love is frivolous.

I don’t complain, however. I know Bobby. I know the limitations of his DNA. When I accept those limitations, am I accepting my own ones?

If I keep contemplating that, I might become a Buddha and discover the fundamental sorrow that underlies all existence. That will make my life more miserable. I will found a religion of sorrows, create a goddess of perpetual grief, and make mine as well as a few others’ lives miserable. The Buddha couldn’t ever smile because he had not discovered the blessings of dilettantism. The great soul never knew the simple joys of life.

Today, in the post-truth world, dilettantism is the ideal religion. It helps me to smile when the MLA whom I voted for sells himself for a few crore rupees to another party that is diametrically opposed to all that I voted for. When the US Securities and Exchange Commission reports that the Oracle Corporation paid $400,000 in bribes to certain Indian politicians in Goa and Assam and my government which is otherwise eager to send a barrage of investigative agencies to ensure that truth always triumphs (Satyameva Jayate) chooses to turn a blind eye, the dilettante in me can smile and look for new flowers. When a hyperactive investigative agency actually arrests a person for being honest, I can look for yet another flower. This dilettantism is a good religion. Wanna join?