The tyranny of trifles

When I was cleaning my room sometime last week, I stumbled upon an odd assortment of bills, tickets, cards and keychains. While that makes me sound like a hoarder in desperate need of lessons from Marie Kondo, this collection of trifles came into existence because I tend to take away a little bit of every experience I find myself enjoying, to drop into and save in a jar.     

All of us keep all sorts of random objects in the strangest of places, don't we ? The old pens lying near the driver's seat of your car - the ones you never bother to replace although you know that none of them work. What about that unused fancy notebook with the stunning cover you've stowed away in your bag somewhere, right next to a nearly empty stick of lip-balm ? I think that much of their value is derived from the 'perfect' circumstances we're waiting for to use them in - with the result that we don't throw them away if they're dysfunctional, or eventually use them years after they're purchased.    

There's a lovely poem by Bill Collins ( I know I referenced one of his poems in my previous post but he really does write the most wonderful things ! ) titled 'The chair no one sits in' and I think it captures exactly what I'm trying to articulate.

You see them on porches and on lawns

down by the lakeside,

usually arranged in pairs implying a couple

who might sit there and look out

at the water or the big shade trees.

The trouble is you never see anyone

sitting in these forlorn chairs

though at one time it must have seemed

a good place to stop and do nothing for a while.

Sometimes there is a little table

between the chairs where no one

is resting a glass or placing a book facedown.

It might be none of my business,

but it might be a good idea one day

for everyone who placed those vacant chairs

on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them

for the sake of remembering

whatever it was they thought deserved

to be viewed from two chairs

side by side with a table in between.

The clouds are high and massive that day.

The woman looks up from her book.

The man takes a sip of his drink.

Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking,

the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird

then another, cries of joy or warning—

it passes the time to wonder which.

Perhaps it is the air of triviality around some of these trifles that helps me make peace with my conscience when I can't seem to remember what on earth I was thinking when I bought them. That's also why we don't mind not knowing information sometimes, right ? They're dismissed as being trivia and therefore not worth devoting time to read about. For instance, when I was younger, I assumed for some reason that 'trifle' was just 'truffle' pronounced differently - not realising that they were two entirely dissimilar sugarcoated delights. Truth be told, I did not uncover the truth until a week ago when I found myself writing this piece because until then I really didn't have to have been in the know.

Truffles

Trifle

The only silver lining I can see in these embarrassing circumstances is that I stumbled upon this website with more than fifty different trifle recipes and another one for truffles - check them out if you feel like whipping up some dessert over the weekend ! 

Sometimes, I find that we assign this notion of triviality to experiences as well. For instance, think about the hours we spend watching that one guilty pleasure of a show or a film. More often than not, it's something from the rom-com genre starring one of the many Hughs - Hugh Grant, Hugh Dancy, Hugh Laurie or even Hugh Jackman - and I don't know how many of us willingly admit to doing so. Sometimes, all I want to do at the end of a tiring day it plunge into a world where no matter what the challenges are, everything is set right at the end of a couple of hours !

Simply because something comes across as being frivolous, why do we discount the joy we derive from it and choose to dismiss it arbitrarily ?

The idea is perhaps perfectly summed up in a review of Oscar Wilde's The importance of being Ernest. 

The play revolves around Gwendolen Fairfax who is convinced that she must marry a man named Ernest and none else. When her admirer Jack Worthing comes to know of this foible, he consults clergyman Dr. Chasuble in a desperate attempt to be rechristened and the comical events birthed by this premise make up the rest of the play. The final act reveals ironically that Jack who was adopted at birth by a certain Mr. Cardrew, had originally been named Ernest and his dilemma ceases to exist !

The critic describes the work as the most trivial of Wilde's society plays, and the only one that produces "that peculiar exhilaration of the spirit by which we recognise the beautiful." "It is", he writes, "precisely because it is consistently trivial that it is not ugly."

I couldn't agree more, for there is a certain comfort we derive from seemingly trivial moments of daily existence. Whether it is the joy of discovering that someone shares a birthday with me, or meeting someone as clueless about riding a bicycle as I am, finding ears that listen when I feel like ripping my hair out or even having a good laugh over something ridiculous on Instagram ! So maybe trifles - tangible or otherwise, aren't so tyrannical after all ?