Pleasance, the feeling of feeling pleased

I want to return to a notion I touched upon last week - the archaic word, 'pleasance'. Google Ngram viewer reveals that 'pleasance' had its heyday in Tudor times, fading away before returning to more modest usage from the late 17th century until the end of the 19th century. Shakespeare uses the word but twice, once in a love poem, and once in Othello. As I type the word, Blogger helpfully underlines it in red, suggesting 'pleasant' instead.

Wiktionary gives: (Obsolete) The feeling of being pleased. [14th-19th c.] 

It is not so much feeling 'pleasured', but the experience of feeling pleased.

Note the passive voice. It's something that happens to you, not something you do ('I go out and enjoy').

It is momentary feeling of mild euphoria. It feels familiar; it brings back pleasant associations. It comes on quickly and passes quickly - but you notice it; it lifts your spirits. It is very much a qualia thing - a subjective conscious experience. I try to identify it, pin it down. An effect - so it must have a cause.

I had one on Sunday morning in the kitchen, stirring a home-made lentil and spinach curry and rice as I finished my coffee. And another one while eating it later on the działka, that feeling of feeling replete. This makes me wonder whether these particular qualia (individual instances of subjective, conscious experience) are endogenous (hormones released upon feeling sated by food) or exogenous (the ingestion of a stimulant).

But moments of pleasance can just happen, untriggered, unbidden, and these are the ones I want to focus on, as they appear utterly random, without obvious causation. Pleasance always accompanies those Wordsworthian flashbacks - whether from this life or elsewhere. My flashbacks are never anything other than pleasant and familiar. This is, I believe, significant - I don't have unpleasant ones that feel unfamiliar.

One I had just now (again in the kitchen), out of nowhere, a flashback to the coach carrying our Polish scout troop back to Hammersmith after our annual pilgrimage to Aylesford Priory in Kent; it's a Sunday, the coach driver has BBC Radio 1's Pick of the Pops on the radio. I'm looking out of the window at South-East London, known to me at that time only from these journeys. I must have done this trip by coach seven or eight times, with the cubs then the scouts. I could feel that precise atmosphere - the summer holidays had just ended, the school term just begun, autumn was drawing near. 

And in a second it was gone; just a pleasant micro-memory of a old, familiar memory remained to tinge my consciousness with its flavour.

This particular flashback has occurred to me often enough to be entered into the qualia compilation category. 

Another flashback that conjures up pleasance is an unbidden recall of the Hornby Dublo model railway catalogue from the early-1960s. These toy trains were decidedly too expensive for me to have, but simply having the catalogue to gaze at generated much anticipatory pleasance, something that was never to be consummated; never mind - I could imagine the engines, the carriages, the track... "Ah, vanitas vanitatum, which of us is happy in this life? Which of us has our desire, or having it, is gratified?" The last line of William Thackeray's Vanity Fair contains much truth - never having had a model railway, the memories of the catalogue - and my childhood imaginings of the models - remain powerfully pleasant in my mind when they flash back.

I have become particularly sensitive to these flashbacks when they appear within my stream of consciousness. Where are they from, why do they appear, are there triggers deeper than I am aware of; and above all the similarity between these - which I can clearly identify from this life - and those that I  feel exactly the same, but are from a pre-1957 past.

And here's one - I recently wrote about the experience of firing from a WW2-era M1 carbine. That phantom gun is with me; early today I felt the exact sensation of steadying my aim by wrapping the carbine's khaki web sling around my left elbow - yet the guns on the shooting range were all without slings. As I imagined this, I had no target, no warrior-like emotion, just that feeling of twining that strap around my arm to get a steadier shot. Completely unbidden - I was thinking about eating a box of blueberries at the time. But again, it was a moment of pleasance.

By the way, the Othello quote is nicely synchronistic:

I remember a mass of things, but nothing distinctly;
a quarrel, but nothing wherefore. O God, that men
should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away
their brains! that we should, with joy, pleasance
revel and applause, transform ourselves into beasts!

Such times we live in...

This time last year:
Another dream of Dziadio

This time six years ago:
Teetering between rage and reason

This time seven years ago:
Poland - it works!

This time eight years ago:
Bricktorian Birmingham

This time ten years ago:
Fog hits Modlin Airport

This time 11 years ago:
The local elections and what they mean

This time 12 years ago:
Synchronicity of shape - Powiśle, Hanger Lane, Mel's Drive-In

This time 13 years ago:
The last of Jeziorki's noted landmark - the Rampa na kruszywa

This time 14 years ago:
Jeziorki spared high-density development thanks to airport zoning