Letter #208: What I Learned at the Kenyan Knife Fight

And other supposedly fun things I’ll never do again

Dad,

One time, in college, I found myself on the dance floor of a nightclub in Kenya. The reasons why are much less exciting than you might imagine, but for legal purposes I feel I should stress that no illicit substances or activities were involved. My only reason for even mentioning it is the thought that struck me, totally unbidden, in the middle of some indecipherable techno-murmuring that we were all vaguely swaying to.

I looked around at the wiry teenagers, the petty drug dealers, the lads and lasses engaged in a variety of internationally recognized courtship rituals, and I thought, no one here is having fun. Not one person. We are all doing something called “going out,” a custom that ranks more as an obligation than as genuine recreation. The most that can be said about it is that some people use it as a springboard for one-night stands. At least they have an objective, I suppose.

Plenty of other people, though, are just there for want of other options—because this is something they’re supposed to like and to be seen liking. The minute I had that thought on the dance floor, true story, a knife fight broke out several feet away from me. I guess it was a way to pass the time.

A supposedly fun thing I’ll never do again, as David Foster Wallace said of his time on a cruise ship, and I never have. If at any moment you could find yourself bleeding out in some Nairobi alleyway, I reasoned, then the things you do for enjoyment should probably be, you know…enjoyable?

This should not rank as a shattering insight. And yet, as your letter from yesterday indicates, it does. We naturally want happiness but look for it—tragically, disastrously—in all the ways and for all the reasons that are bound to deprive us of the very thing we most truly desire.

This is why I suspect the devil hates few things more than sincere pleasure, pursued for its own sake. The sight of people doing things they enjoy, because they enjoy them, must throw him into an infernal rage. We think he means to entice us with all the nice goodies mean old God won’t let us have. In fact he wants to get us so far from God that we can’t even enjoy the goodies anymore.

That’s why this year at Lent I’m noticing how many of the traditional prayers represent self-denial as an act of purification for the sake of joy—“That…cleansed by yearly penitence, / we may press on to celebrate / the Paschal feast.”

If our pleasures are “dirty,” it’s only in the sense that a window gets dirty: the junk we crave clouds our vision of the good we seek. You scrub away the shallow indulgences so that you can see more clearly what will really satisfy. As Jesus indicates, unless you understand fasting as something you get to do—instead of balefully advertising it as something you have to do—you’re kind of missing the point. Which is how you end up in a crime-ridden Kenyan nightclub, or at a bar with an orange for a head.

Love,
Spencer