With the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, my thoughts turned, this week, to dinner conversations, and especially to the fragments of post-dinner conversations that I remember from my childhood. And these reflections prompted me to think about an essay that I wrote about this very subject a few years ago. It doesn’t surprise me that rereading that essay compelled me to fiddle around with the sentences, nor does it surprise me to see that I soon ended up with a completely new essay, the story mostly the same, the paragraphs mostly the same, the words completely new.
As a consequence of World War II, I drink black coffee. Admittedly, in all of the tectonic shifts during those years, this minuscule note is a bit trivial, and it also stretches the nature of causality to its limit, because my birth doesn’t arrive until a few generations later. Yet this remains the only story that I can tell about my preferences. It is how I understand a decision that I made just this morning, despite the chasm between this decision and that distant war. There’s nothing original about stating that even the smallest acts trigger a cascade of consequences, but it is rare for those consequences to be visible.
To describe the scene in detail necessitates that I somehow sharpen a hazy memory, although I can at least narrow the timeline to an elusive period between the ages of five and ten, and I can also describe the setting as a family dinner table, where the curiosity of hearing an adult conversation competes—for one of the first times—against the thrill of some nearby toy.
Now it is already too late to set the table for you, because dinner has ended. The room is narrow and crowded and eight or ten or perhaps even more people jam closer in my grandparents’ home. All the plates have been taken away, but here we sit, just talking, with the chairs now turned, twisted, and bunched, the post-dinner chat lively and undirected.
To my young ear, the conversation is too fast, too disjointed, and I can only comprehend fragments, or perhaps grasp that the subject is political—although my ability to know what political means isn’t that strong. A few words from that evening have stayed with me through the decades, and, as I recall those specific sentences now, I can understand the larger context of the adult conversation. Hearing the post-dinner conversation echo in my ear so many years later reminds me of the phrase l’esprit de l’espalier; it means staircase wit, or staircase mind, though it is rather oddly known better in English than in French. To understand the phrase, imagine yourself at a cocktail party, imagine that someone insults you, and then imagine the tragedy of your wordless reply. Later, as you descend the staircase to leave, still wounded by the insult, you have an epiphany: the perfect retort for that moment! That’s l’esprit de l’espalier, the sensation of the witty reply that appears, much too late, when you’re on the staircase and leaving the party—it is a phrase that seems apt in this moment, as I believe that I finally have a response to one of my grandfather’s political statements.
Although it is reasonable to assume that my attention strayed during that political conversation, especially because the image that I most remember today, the image that reaches through the decades and strikes me right now, is much more tangible. What I see clearly is the post-dinner coffee. How it came with countless nuances and quirks and as a long and peculiar operation. Once dinner ends, and the coffee brews, I observe the chaotic, seemingly haphazard choices of those around the table: with sugar and without sugar, or with one, two, or three splashes of milk. Every cup looks different, and only one, I notice, lacks any accoutrements, and that was my grandfather’s, as the liquid in his cup remains as black as the shades which surround this memory.
I soon learn that my grandfather once enjoyed milk to his coffee, too, but that he had lost the habit during World War II when milk wasn’t available. The change in supplies because of the war triggered a change in his preferences, which isn’t, to be fair, an unusual preference, though it certainly seems so to me, as I can only compare it to all the fussing and pouring and stirring that comes with every other cup. My grandfather offers me a sip and, just before the curtain closes on this memory, I see his smile as he watches me drink.
By a perfectly reasonable logic I can remember consciously wanting to emulate how my grandfather drank coffee many years later, for no discernible reason other than the positive associations I had of him, especially because I didn’t, at first, prefer the taste. Where you opt to assign causality might be tighter in scope—maybe not the war, maybe not some nameless general who limited milk rations, maybe not even that dinner conversation. Yet I am still most intrigued by the momentum behind this cascade of decisions. There’s a spiraling, a restricting of choices, where one decision begets the next, again and again, until decades have passed, and what might be considered the root cause of a moment is long forgotten. Perhaps the difficulty comes from uncovering the momentum behind some incidental, reflexive choice that you make today: underneath every option that you perceive in any one moment is an obscured past with all its well-trodden roads.
Most people have an intuitive sense for this dynamic, especially when it prompts a downward spiral. Momentum, seen this way, amid any dismal story, has the appearance of perpetual acceleration: a faster plunge, the worsening slump, an even greater collapse. A pithy George Orwell line describes the downfall well: “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” The momentum of poor choices, misfortune, and failure is clear to anyone with open eyes, yet the reverse is also true, as an uphill climb can feel like a downhill slide when success mounts upon success: a professional victory brings even more opportunities, a personal triumph steers toward a new introduction and another triumph. Finding yourself on the right side of this momentum, where success feeds success, just might compensate for those times when the equation is tipped against you, and the options become narrower, the choices poorer.
One easy conclusion is that it is quite difficult to remain motionless. You’re either on an upward or downward staircase, and the momentum of your journey is always accelerating. A habit can be difficult to spot, even though its grooves deepen over time. At the moment of choice, the vista looks open, free, as if you’re choosing without restriction, as if you haven’t been constrained long before the choice even arrives. You are, it appears, the author of your preferences. However, on some occasions you do spot the contingencies within those preferences, so that a choice that feels intrinsic to you is actually a consequence of choices that you didn’t make. Such as my decision, just this morning, to brew coffee in a particular way, indirectly following the momentum of choices made long before my birth, struck by how far into the past a choice can reach.
As a young boy, I used to sit next to my father and watch as he wrote letters and legal notes with his fountain pen on long, yellow pads. I was mesmerized by his immaculate cursive and asked him what a particular word meant. And he said, “Words mean things, Johnny. Pick them carefully.” That was the beginning, I realize now as I ponder your essay and the notion of habits and momentum. I wanted to write like my father, so I worked on emulating his handwriting. And I made frequent trips to the dictionary (a smart phone would have been handy back then but perhaps the dictionary effort led to better vocabulary retention). We don’t often pinpoint the origin of a habit, or the consequences of its adoption. But in the case of Dad’s calligraphic hand, and his advice about words, my life has been enriched as a consequence. Thanks for another thoughtful essay, Charles.
Sadly, I am a perpetual sufferer of l’esprit de l’espalier.
I drink tea without milk. I worked in Germany for a year (decades after WW2). The office did not have a fridge, so they always had long life milk that did not have to be refrigerated. It was truly disgusting. I have had milk free tea from then on.