Twelve minutes of joy

The day before the photo, above, was taken, I read Sam Lipsyte's recent story 'The Republic of Empathy,' and laughed out loud at this assertion, made by a fictional father: "You can cobble together a solid twelve minutes of unconquerable joy a day caring for a toddler. It's just the other fourteen or fifteen hours that strip your nerves and immolate your spirit."

The day of the photo, I used up my allotment of twelve minutes but quick, on the small sandy beach beside the Simon's Town wharf, as Cleo and I used mussel shells to dig small wells: dark cavities in which we hid pebbles, like pirates burying their treasure.

And several days after the photo was taken, I came across W.S.B. Mathews's account of walking into an orchestral rehearsal, and hearing a piece of music that was, in his words, attractively simple in a way that recalled Mozart, but also earnest, in a manner suggestive of Beethoven. Just then, though, "the counterpoint took a turn which was plainly not Beethoven, but surely the work of some late master, and the question was, Who could have done a thing of this kind so delightfully, with such a reserve?" And then the answer came to mind: it was the symphony in E minor by Brahms - a composition that, Mathews concluded, is "genius in its moments of pure enjoyment."

Twelve minutes of joy; moments of enjoyment. Sure, life is taxing, vexing, and only rarely relaxing. Cleo, it seems, contracted Lyme disease from a tick as we few over an ocean, and we're doing what we can to ease her pain and to find a means of treating a condition that doesn't exist on this continent. But such frictions only augment, I suppose, the quality of joy in our better moments. We are often conquered, but those instants of happiness that cannot be overwhelmed are perhaps the more outstanding for our pedestrian defeats.