Action Man

What is it to be a simple hedonist? Last night I met one. He was drunken, happy and proud; a new father-to-be luxuriating in the splendour of his life and his potency. All were told of his success, hands were shaken and cheeks kissed, hugs exchanged and everyone was complicit in his joy, acceding to the tacit claim that this what life is for, what ‘it’ is all about. And all the while I looked as his relaxed face and his wife’s belly and wondered what it really felt like to be him, to perhaps have nothing to release, no aching sense of loss, to exert that masculine power, wielding it as a lush weapon of idle creation. I imagined that his ardour was simply him and not a component part that was sometimes called upon. When he was younger his first sexual exertion with a woman, or perhaps a girl at school, was his coming of age, was his organising event. All efforts led to this, it was expression but mindless expression, the content provided by the onlooker trying to interpret this behaviour. The mechanical doing of it, the mechanical loving were as genuine as it is possible to be, for there was absolutely no reflection and hence no sense of alternatives and no doubts and anxieties. He was an action man.