“The highest art…sets down its creations and trusts in their magic, without fear of not being understood.” - Herman Hesse

 "Sensuality reconciles us with the human race. The misanthrope of the old is due in large part to the fading of the magic glow of desire" - Eric Hoffer, 1973

Sensuality is not just desire in general; It is desire of the flesh. Desire of the present, the immediate, the overcoming, and the shared. 

Sensuality, or being engaged without sense is a desire which almost always brings us straight back to the present, to the very moment when our desires are engaged. Whereas we spend most of our life thinking of what was and planning for what may be, which are avenues of the mind, the sensations brought on by a warm shower, a soft blanket, or a beautiful laugh, are avenues of the body. They are sensations which we do not manufacture for ourselves. Desire for a moment of sensuality may take the form of a daydream, but that daydream, when it is a matter of sensuality, is a daydream of a moment in the real world. It might be that achieving what we want, like buying the newest car or finally going on the trip to Europe, turns out not to live up to the promise that it seemed to have when it was far away, but that is how sensuality always seems to run. When we remember a physical event from the past, it seems to gain a rosy glow, while becoming vague every year. In the other direction, when we think of what may be, the anticipation of the thing is often sharper in our heads than the things itself, because we can see it so clearly. 

Dessire of the immediate is when we want, and we want it now. It is the inclination not to wait, the feeling that keeps us trying to gain our goal, and the the memory which we know was real. As we grow older, so much of what we want, we are willing to wait for. We are willing to work for it, and often we start to think that it is only worth having, if if we put work into getting it. Part of the point of, say, gaining a skill or learning a new language, is to achieve something that was difficult for us to achieve. We are concerned more about the journey than the destination, and that means that we are more willing to take our time. We take fewer shortcuts, but we also invent fewer shortcuts. 

Sensuality is a type of desire which overcomes us, which knocks us out of our own orbits into another system entirely. We think that we are in control of ourselves most of the time, and most of the time we are. We remain in balance, we think through our actions, we take our time, we measure our risks, and we take steady steps. Through experience, we learn that the slow and steady wins the race more often than not, when the goal is hard to reach. Anything worth having or doing is worth having or doing right., and so we try to do it right. We start to enjoy things less and less because of what they do for us right now, and ore and more for what they mean to us. A kids the softest blanket or the brightest pair of shoes wins our attention, but later on  it becomes the case that a blanket hand-knitted for us by our granddaughter, be it ever so lumpy and itchy, is more important to us than the neatest, newest gadget. Comfortable shoes become so much more important to us, because we are not concerned with sensuality of today, but with the next three years of wearing those shoes everyday. We start to think about going to be with feet that don't hurt, instead of how cool we'll look with our new Air Jordan's. 

Sensuality is a shared happiness. It might seem that enjoyment of the senses is a very personal thing, but even though we experience our senses entirely as an individual, there is a reason for the saying that goes something like: Laughter shared is doubled, and pain shared is halved. The more intellectual our pursuits are, the more we hold them in our heads, and the more sensual our pursuits are, the more we share them with other people. We express joy through our bodies, in our laughter, smiles, and dances. I speak from experience here - the older you are, the more things hurt. We don't just gain more appreciation for mental instead of sensual times, but we also start to actively avoid the occurrence of sensuality. 

Not everybody old is misanthropic. Indeed, many of the 'old' folk you meet are happy individuals to be around, and people who know how to have a good time. Age is more often in the mind, than in the body, after all. Although, I do want to say that there is being old, and there is being old - sixty and seventy is a lot different than ninety and one hundred years of age. Something I see from time to time is folk, at a certain age, just stop wanting to do things, tough things. People are happy to sit in their chairs, or to go to church, but not get on airplanes or go camping. The desire to avoid bad sensations starts to outweigh the desire to experience positive sensations. Those who grow completely divorced from the desire for sensations do often, I think, turn misanthropic, and that can happen at any age. I would say that half the recipe for enjoying being around your fellow men, is just like the feeling of wanting to go out in the sunlight, or to sit in the garden - half the point of the activity isn't to enjoy it, but to just get ou out of the house.