The Pleasure of Anticipation
Why the hours before an evening are part of its pleasure, and the quiet, half-forgotten art of looking forward.
Almost everything we write in these pages is, in one way or another, practical: how to arrive well, how to choose a table, how to be good company. This is not. It is a reflection on something quieter and easily overlooked, a pleasure that arrives before the evening does and is, for those who know how to notice it, among the finest pleasures the evening holds. It is the pleasure of anticipation, of the hours spent looking forward, and it deserves to be savoured rather than rushed past on the way to the thing itself.
We live, increasingly, in an age impatient with waiting, forever hurrying toward the next thing and past the space before it. And in that hurry we have half-forgotten one of life's genuine and freely available pleasures: the simple, warm, expanding delight of looking forward to something good. It is a pleasure worth reclaiming, and an evening in fine company is a fine occasion on which to reclaim it.
The pleasure before the pleasure
There is a truth about happiness that the wise have always known and that even the studious have lately confirmed: that a great part of the pleasure of any fine thing lies in the looking forward to it. The anticipation of a good evening is not merely a prelude to the enjoyment; it is a portion of the enjoyment itself, and sometimes the sweetest portion of all.
Consider how it works. From the moment an evening is arranged, a small light appears on the horizon of one's days, and everything before it is quietly warmed by its glow. The dull afternoon is brightened by the thought of the evening to come. The tedious meeting is made bearable by the pleasure waiting beyond it. The ordinary hours acquire a gladness they would not otherwise have, borrowed from an evening that has not yet arrived. This is the gift of anticipation: it does not merely precede the pleasure, it multiplies it, casting the enjoyment backward across all the time spent waiting.
And there is a purity to anticipated pleasure that the thing itself sometimes cannot match, for in anticipation the evening is still perfect, still entirely promise, unmarked by any of the small imperfections reality inevitably brings. To look forward to something is to enjoy it in its ideal form, and that enjoyment is real, and ours to keep, whatever the evening itself turns out to be.
The hours before
Nowhere is anticipation sweeter than in the hours immediately before an evening out, and those hours are worth inhabiting fully rather than hurrying through.
There is a particular pleasure in the preparation itself, in the unhurried getting ready, the choosing of what to wear, the small rituals of grooming and dressing, each of them quietly charged with the pleasure of the evening they are preparing for. To prepare for a fine evening is to begin enjoying it; the anticipation lives in the very act of making ready. The gentleman who rushes his preparation, or fits it grudgingly into a crowded hour, robs himself of one of the evening's genuine pleasures. The one who gives it room, who dresses without haste and lets the sense of occasion mount, has begun the evening well before he has left the house.
There is pleasure, too, in the mounting sense of occasion, the way the ordinary self of the working day gives way, over those hours, to a lighter and more expectant version, ready for pleasure. This transformation is itself a delight, the setting down of the day and the taking up of the evening, and it happens most completely when it is given time. The hours before an evening are not dead time to be endured until the real event begins; they are the overture, and a beautiful one, for those who learn to hear it.
Anticipation does not merely precede the pleasure. It multiplies it, casting the enjoyment backward across all the hours spent happily waiting for it.
The art of savouring it
If anticipation is a pleasure, then it is one that can be cultivated, and the cultivation is largely a matter of resisting the modern impulse to rush.
It begins with arranging things in advance, and then allowing the interval to do its quiet work. There is a reason the planned evening is sweeter than the impulsive one: the planning creates the horizon of anticipation, the stretch of happy looking-forward that the spontaneous evening never has. To arrange a fine evening some days ahead is to grant oneself the whole of that interval as a pleasure, and it is a pleasure entirely free for the taking. The gentleman who books ahead is not merely being prudent; he is giving himself the gift of anticipation.
It continues with the discipline, gentle but real, of not hurrying past the waiting. Our instinct, in an impatient age, is to fill every moment and rush toward every pleasure, and in doing so we trample the quieter delight of simply looking forward. To savour anticipation is to resist that, to let oneself dwell now and then on the evening to come, to enjoy the imagining of it, to let it warm the ordinary hours rather than treating the wait as mere obstacle. This is not idleness; it is a way of extracting the fullest pleasure from a fine thing, beginning long before the thing arrives.
And it asks, finally, that we leave a little room. An over-scheduled life, racing from one thing to the next, has no space in it for anticipation, no interval in which to look forward, because the next thing is always already upon us. The pleasure of anticipation requires a little emptiness before the event, a clearing in which to stand and enjoy the approach. To leave that room is to make space for one of life's freely given joys.
How it deepens the evening
There is a further gift in all this, which is that anticipation, well savoured, does not spend itself before the evening but enriches it. The evening long looked forward to arrives already warmed by all the pleasure of the waiting, carrying the accumulated gladness of the hours spent anticipating it.
The gentleman who has looked forward to an evening, who has prepared for it unhurriedly and let his pleasure mount through the day, arrives at it in a different and better state than the man who has rushed to it straight from his obligations. He arrives glad, expectant, already half in the pleasure, and that gladness colours the whole of the evening that follows. Anticipation and enjoyment are not two separate things but one continuous pleasure, beginning in the looking-forward and flowing seamlessly into the evening itself, each enriching the other.
This is why the pleasure of anticipation is worth reclaiming, not merely for its own sake, though it is lovely in itself, but because it makes the evening it precedes richer, fuller and more completely enjoyed. To look forward well is to enjoy more, both before and during, and that is a return on a very small and pleasant investment.
The light on the horizon
There is a quiet wisdom in learning again to look forward, in an age that has rather forgotten how. It costs nothing, it asks only a little patience and a little room, and it repays them with one of the most reliable and freely available pleasures life offers: the warm, expanding gladness of a good thing approaching, and the light it casts backward across all the ordinary hours between now and then.
An evening in fine company is a fine thing to look forward to, and the looking forward is part of what one is paying for, though it appears on no bill. So when such an evening is arranged, let the anticipation be part of the pleasure. Let the hours before be savoured, the preparation unhurried, the imagining enjoyed. The evening itself will come, and be all it promises. But the pleasure, for those who know how to notice, will have begun long before, in the simple and lovely act of looking forward to it.
Should you wish for an evening worth anticipating, in the finest of company, our team is always glad to arrange it, and to give you, along with the evening, all the pleasure of looking forward to it.
