And what they experience as tedium is, for us, a rare and peculiar form of delight.
Consuming them feels like a private behavior, a rare antisocial form of delight.
Mr. Lopate's reminiscence, happily, is concerned less with prestige than with pleasure, and the critical essays collected in his engaging 1998 book "Totally, Tenderly, Tragically" are, like any criticism worth reading, evidence that seriousness is an ennobled form of delight.
Susan Sontag similarly argued that it was a symptom of psychological immaturity not to recognise that many morally immature people willingly experience a form of delight, in some an erotic breaking of taboo, when witnessing violence, suffering and pain being inflicted on others.
"Tummy Tempters: Food Films" ranges from "Bread," about the many forms of that basic delight, to "In the Night Kitchen," an adaptation of Maurice Sendak's picture book about a boy's culinary dreamland.
Although he had deep respect for the traditional forms of music, Fauré delighted in infusing those forms with a mélange of harmonic daring and a freshness of invention.
When asked in what form, Holloway says with a hoot of delight: "Ooh, that would be giving it away, wouldn't it … That's all I'm prepared to say … It's not a hologram".
But in comic operas it is almost impossible to sort out how much of the comic effect is derived from the book and how much from the music; and the highest forms of musical humour, the unexpected delights of a lighthearted scherzo by Mozart, defy verbal analysis, unless it is so specialized and technical as to defeat its purpose.
The energy and push of the musical numbers, acting as a form of parody — a delight.
In the Mohists' defense, one might argue that all goods at least produce some general feeling of satisfaction, if not delight, and that things that do not genuinely benefit us produce at best only a transient, unstable, or otherwise deficient form of satisfaction or delight.
