A very temperate Fall here in Edinburgh. Each morning the smell of hops brewing seeps up from the ground; it's a smell I associate, for some reason, with Cheerios left lying in milk. Do Cheerios have hops in them?

Yesterday I went with my flatmate to the Thermos Museum; later we saw a small girl with a green face and a pink bear clinging to her chest run from a shop. We stopped at the goldfish pond of the big museum. It was a fresh day full of visions.

Actually the Thermos Museum wasn't there, so we went to the art gallery that we found there instead. One small room had a load of quick drawings by a Stuart _____. These were slightly rough-lined portraits of people, with slightly inflated heads, and with snippets of things they'd said, written in a barely-legible cursive and a barely-legible rendition of a Scottish accent. One wall was all people in pubs, saying things. "I'm sixty-one years old," said a burly man with a short beard in one drawing, "and ah'm built like brick shithoose. Ah've got a kerd says ah'm a black-belt in karate... I've got to carry it cause with my skills I could kill someone." Another man, middle-aged with glasses, was overwhelmed by the portaitist himself: "Oh, God, don't that look just like me? Wait till I show it to the missus. Oh, God, Oh, God."

Today I had enough coffee (light poured out of me) and walked through a park (busy with young footballers) and along the canal (ducks, swans).

This clement, yet crisp, weather, and the orange blush of the trees, bring me to an umfamiliar feeling of well-being. I do remember this: moments of unmixed bliss, the sense of happiness and play that comes of being in grass with friends nearby. Of knowing that things are sweet, we have our whole lives to live, there will be many more Autumn Sundays, and none any worse than this.

When I hear that voice in my head that says, "Look, you're happy right now! Notice this! Come back to it!" I answer it with, "Yes, so; but only because of our privilege." This habit is either morally very wise or psychologically disastrous.

Sofia Coppola said of her heroines that they're all trapped, but that Marie Antoinette is the one who's taking some advantage of it, the only one who's actually enjoying her life. It's a good portrait of that: a character embracing the material pleasures of her life. So a film like Marie Antoinette (and, for that matter, Coppola's previous two films), stirs this unease in me: somehow the pleasures on offer are only material, only fleeting, only unearned ones. The characters seem to be struggling against purposelessness, but they seem to exult in indulgence and stimulation.

When Antoinette and her (anonymous) friends stay up all night to watch the sunrise, she gushes, "Isn't that the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?" Nothing else flies between the characters at that moment—an opportunity for vulnerability, for connection, for cataclysm, or any other alteration, is squandered. Likewise, the long scene of drunken karaoke and strange Tokyo house-parties, from Lost in Translation, provokes a feeling of merely adequate stimulation—and none of the sense of transformation (however small) that one might expect from such an ex-static moment. The characters seem to get just enough endorphins from this stuff so as to enjoy their lives.

So it could be with me and you and everyone we know, perhaps. I don't let myself. I believe deeply that the lesson of Marie Antoinette (the lesson omitted from Marie Antoinette) is the critical one: You can indulge, and enjoy, for now, it is true; but sooner or later an angry mob will come round smashing your chandeliers and disconnecting your body at the neck. And whether they do or not, the pleasures of cakes, bouffants, and Manolo Blahnik shoes are fleeting. The pleasures of engagment with others and of commitment to change, those will outlive any guillotine.