Axël's Vacation

 A friend and I are traveling tomorrow to Wyoming. He texted me yesterday to tell me I'd better be excited—because studies have shown that most of the joy people experience in every vacation is to be found in the anticipation of it, rather than the real thing. 

"You'd better savor it now," he said, "because this is the only pleasure you're going to get. If you're not excited at this point, you're squandering it."

To this I responded that I would concentrate my joy into the trip's first hours—but only once we actually got there. We would land at the airport and behold the Rocky Mountains and the sweeping plains. I would say: "See? I told you it was beautiful." 

My friend acknowledged—catering to my fantasy—that he might say, "Yes, I doubted you. You tried to tell me, but I didn't believe you. But now that I see it, I admit: it really is beautiful."

But would we enjoy ourselves after that—my friend asked? I said that we would probably go through stages. A day or two in, we would say to ourselves: "Uh oh... why did we schedule a week and a half here? That's way too much time. What are we going to do with ourselves?" 

Then, a day or two later, we would suddenly say: "Ack! There's not enough time! It's already Wednesday! The trip is practically over! We have to maximize it." 

And then—by the final dinner—we would reach a kind of acceptance. We would say—like the three women in the most recent season of The White Lotus—"the passage of time has given us meaning. If nothing else, we have gone through life together." 

And so we were able to sketch out in anticipation the full trip before it had even happened. 

Which raises the question: what's the point now of even going through with it?

"We have just consumed the future," as the eponymous protagonist tells his paramour, in Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's closet drama Axël, after she has just sketched out the ultimate world-traveling itinerary for the two lovers to enjoy, now that they have come into money—

"All the realities, what would they be tomorrow," Axël asks, "compared with the mirages we have just lived?" (Guicharnaud trans.)

Axël concludes that actual experience would be nothing compared to the savor of mere anticipation—and so, one might as well destroy oneself before actually trying to recreate in experience what one has first tasted much more sweetly in the realm of contemplation. 

Like the two friends in Flaubert's Sentimental Education—they decide that, having planned a night of pleasure for themselves so thoroughly, and delighted so much in the prospect—there is no reason left anymore to actually follow through on it. 

"Isn't the most reliable form of pleasure, Flaubert implies, the pleasure of anticipation?" summarizes Julian Barnes, in Flaubert's Parrot. "Who needs to burst into fulfillment's desolate attic?" (That last phrase is a reference to a line from a poem on a rather shocking theme by Philip Larkin—

—a poem, if you really want to deepen the strangeness, that—according to Martin Amis—Margaret Thatcher once quoted from memory as her favorite of Larkin's verses; but that's neither here nor there.)

"There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto," as a character gnomically puts it in a Cormac McCarthy novel. 

It would seem—then—that in trying to get me to savor my anticipation ahead of time—since the actual experience will bring no joy in comparison—my friend was channeling his inner Axël, his inner Villiers, his inner Flaubert. 

But when I had told him earlier this summer the plot of Axël, and its message of self-destruction—he himself had given the best possible rejoinder. 

"That's stupid," he said.