Sunday Express, UK
January 2, 2005
JB PRIESTLEY’S DELIGHTS
JB Priestley’s timeless, uplifting essays on the nature of delight
have proved a huge hit with Sunday Express readers.
Please keep your own delights coming – we will publish our third
collection of your contributions soon.
ROMANTIC RECOGNITION
TWO EXAMPLES will do. When we were flying from Erivan, the capital of
Armenia, to Sukham, on the Black Sea, a Soviet scientist, who spoke
English, tapped me on the shoulder and then pointed to a fearsome
rock face, an immeasurable slab bound in the iron of eternal winter.
“That, ” he announced, “is where Prometheus was chained.”
And then all my secret terror – for a journey among the mountains of
the Caucasus in a Russian plane is to my unheroic soul an ordeal –
gave way for a moment to wonder and delight, as if an illuminated
fountain had shot up in the dark.
And then, years earlier, in the autumn of 1914, when we were on a
route march in Surrey, I happened to be keeping step with the company
commander, an intelligent Regular lent to us for a month or two. We
were passing a little old woman who was watching us from an open
carriage, near the entrance to a mansion.
“Do you know who that is?” the captain asked; and, of course, I
didn’t. “It’s the Empress Eugenie, ” he told me; and young and
loutish as I was in those days, nevertheless there flared about me
then, most delightfully, all the splendour and idiocy of the Second
Empire, and I knew that we, every man Jack of us, were in history,
and knew once and for all.
WHAT IS YOUR DELIGHT?
Write to: Priestley Delights, Sunday Express, Number 10 Lower Thames
Street, London EC3 6ER E-mail: sunday. exletters@express. co. uk