In his memoirs, C. S. Lewis describes his happy place: “On a Saturday afternoon in winter, when nose and fingers might be pinched enough to give an added relish to the anticipation of tea and fireside, and the whole week-end’s reading lay ahead,” he says, “I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached on earth.” Elsewhere the great Christian apologist writes, “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
I’ve never cared for these descriptions of happiness. Saturday night alone? Cold winters? Tea? But it’s the open-endedness and the sense of unboundedness and possibility in Lewis’s words that make them compelling even to people who dislike tea or winter. The virginal anticipation of a long weekend, a bottomless teacup, and an endless book: Happiness for Lewis involves overcoming time, someone or something slowing down the clock and calendar.
Lewis wrote about Saturday afternoons, but Sunday is the day when time can truly be stopped. I remember the endless Sundays of my childhood. They would start in church and continue at my grandmother’s house. I was still too short to be able to peek for very long, on tiptoe, above the edge of the dining room table, and since this was before my parents learned I needed glasses, I couldn’t see the faces across the long oval table. But I knew that everyone there was family. Everyone stayed for hours; the conversation didn’t “go” anywhere. It floated like a hot air balloon.
The table stood in a long room with French doors, which were always open, and gave way to a sunny garden full of mangoes and crotons. I would slip from my mother’s lap along the table into the garden and then return, skipping back and forth on the red tile on an endless loop. The conversation and laughter indoors and the birdsong outside were the soundtrack of the day. The meal ended with a fruit salad soaked in condensed milk. But Sunday never ended: It was less like a period of time than like a place, a shelter that one had to leave in order to re-enter Monday morning and the rest of the week.
Today the endless Sunday survives mostly in what is sometimes called “the Global South.” A few years ago I commiserated about this with an old man from Nigeria who worked as a doorman in New York. We traded nostalgic memories about the endless Sundays in our respective countries of birth. My friend was planning on moving back to Nigeria upon retirement. Sundays were a big reason why. “Here people aren’t around on Sundays. They come to your house for a couple of hours. Then they have to leave!” he lamented.
Was he able to return to endless Sundays? I don’t think they exist anymore where I grew up. It is not just our childhoods that my Nigerian friend and I were nostalgic for. My grandmother enjoyed endless Sundays too, and she was not a child. The sun hung around longer in the sky above, and shone upon the old and young alike.
I think that the popularity of brunch—which often doesn’t even start until one—comes from its kinship to the endless Sundays of the past. Like Lewis’s teacup, the bottomless mimosa is a symbol of eternity. Brunch is the perfect excuse for eating not only during so-called “lunchtime” but also a little bit before and a little bit after that. Brunch is a long luxurious marinating in conversation and drink. What was once dismissed as a luxury for single people with high incomes is now enjoyed by parents with children. Everybody likes brunch.
However pleasant, brunch offers little resistance to the onrushing week. The Sunday scaries eventually arrive, and then it’s all over. But my endless Sundays were relaxing and free. Hours after the fruit salad dessert, there was coffee and a delivery of sweets from the nearby bakery: fluffy pastries, dulce de leche, coconut, and mascarpone. Then another round in the garden. On Easter Sunday, the day was even longer: My grandmother would crack open a huge chocolate egg and we would chat while eating the pieces. Even now, that’s how I can tell it’s Easter: The endless Sunday is back.
