OLAB The morality of pleasure

[OLAB]...Every creating of any kind has an intended recipient or benefactee.  Adam, before his fall, was a 21-string match with the Word of God, as the intended recipient of the objects of Creation.  For all creators, the primary intended recipient is themselves; they create to produce their own pleasure, a pleasure described by Hopkins in The Windhover as:  ‘the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!’  Ironically, it was Morris who believed in creating things for their beauty-in-themselves, with himself as the intended recipient of the pure pleasure, whereas Hopkins believed (with some justice; cf. Satan falling) that beauty was dangerous (line 11 of The Windhover) – hence, he destroyed about 2,000 of his poems because they were things of beauty, because they gave him a pleasure which he felt was morally wrong.  In his life as Jeremiah, the pleasure-pride he experienced after creating the original version of Lamentations, was indeed morally wrong (akin to Satan falling) and God punished him by destroying the manuscript.  As Hopkins, he punished himself.  We shall return to that question in the next chapter.  [The heroes in the novels of Ayn Rand, the philosopher of rational selfishness, are all creators who produce explicitly for their own pleasure.  In Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis argues (against Calvin) that pleasure is a divine experience, to be sought and enjoyed.  The framers of the American Declaration of Independence ennobled this as ‘the pursuit of happiness’.]

CONTEXT: extract from Against the American Heresy