I only knew the word as the name of a soap, because a soap company’s appropriation of the word seems to have killed it as the useful word it had been. And we don’t have another word that means quite the same thing.
Do not, for example, make the mistake of equating “zest” with excitement, as Catholic theologian Friedrich von Hügel explained more than a century ago.
“A wonderful thoughtful friend insisted to me that the soul’s health and happiness depended upon a maximum of zest and as little as possible of excitement,” von Hügel wrote to his niece Gwendolyn in 1920. One of Europe’s major religious scholars in the first decades of the 20th century and a very wise man, von Hügel gave Gwendolyn intellectual and spiritual instruction that she later published as “Letters to a Niece.”
“Zest is the pleasure which comes from thoughts, occupations, etc., that fit into, that are continuous, applications, etc., of extant habits and interests of a good kind — duties and joys that steady us and give us balance and centrality,” he explained. In contrast, “excitement is the pleasure which comes from breaking loose, from fragmentariness, from losing our balance and centrality.”
He added: “Zest is natural warmth — excitement is fever heat.” (In another place, he differentiates the two as “action” and “activity.”)
The trap of mere excitement
The world easily excites us, and excites us about many things, one excitement often following quickly on another, and another after that. You can spend hours getting excited, because excitement feels good. It’s a kind of rush. And a trap.
Excitement is the experience of sitting in your Ferrari at the starting line of a race track and continually racing the engine to enjoy the roar and attract admiration, but never actually driving the car. Zest is the experience of racing that Ferrari around the track.
You can please yourself by racing the engine, because it sounds so cool and you can do it so easily. But racing the car takes effort and concentration, built on lots of practice, including a good bit of tedium, and includes some risk and danger.
You can either enjoy the car as a toy, like a child, or race the car the way it’s meant to be raced.
The first gives you a thrill, but the second a pleasure. We tend to prefer thrills to pleasures, because thrills are thrilling. They hit us quicker and harder. We would enjoy the pleasures more deeply, they would satisfy us more, but we’d have to give up the thrills to get them, and most of us don’t want to do that.
As von Hügel explained, zest “requires much self-discipline and recollection — much spaciousness of mind: whereas the more distracted we are, the more racketed and impulse-led, the more we thirst for excitement, and the more its scirocco air dries up our spiritual sap and makes us long for more excitement.”
The car is made for the zestful use and not the exciting use. We are made for the satisfaction of the first more than for the transitory enjoyment of the second.
Von Hügel encouraged Gwendolyn to “feed upon zest — and zest-bringing things.” If she did, she would “be able with little or no human encouragement to escape excitement, lopsidedness, oddity, etc.”
A zestful life requires intention and effort
Friedrich von Hügel’s description of excitement expresses an insight into human life others have offered in other ways. The 17th-century mathematician-philosopher Blaise Pascal, for example, wrote of the “diversions” we use to keep ourselves from seeing ourselves too clearly.
“Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance,” he wrote in a book of collected sayings called “Pensées,” “men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” Instead, we pursue the experiences von Hügel called excitements. As Pascal memorably put it, “We prefer the hunt to the capture.”
Pascal thought of diversions as a defense mechanism, a way of blocking out a truth about ourselves too painful to see. Von Hügel thought of excitements as attractions, activities we enjoy so much we forget about the work we have to pursue that is not so immediately satisfying.
We fall into both diversions and excitements, because all we have to do is relax into what is a kind of bliss, the bliss of feeling comfortable with ourselves, of not feeling unsatisfactory or guilty, or the bliss of finding life a continual excitement. We have to make some effort to live a zestful life. But we have aid. The liturgy, for example, teaches us zestfulness in showing us how to pray. It trains us to pursue in every part of life good habits and interests that become welcome duties, and thus to find joys more compelling than excitements.
