Audiobook - Conversational, Non-Fiction
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EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
North American (General) North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
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my forthcoming work in five volumes. The neglect of cheese and European literature is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it's doubtful if I shall ever live to finish it. Some overflowing from such a fountain of information, may therefore be permitted to spy. Sprinkle these pages. I can not yet wholly explain the neglect to which I refer. Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese. Virgil, if I remember right, refers to it several times, but with too much Roman restraint, he does not let himself go on cheese. The only other poet I can think of just now who seems to have had some sensibility on the point was the nameless author of The Nursery Rhyme, which says, if all the trees were bread and cheese, which is indeed a rich and gigantic vision of the higher glutton me. If all the trees were bread and cheese, there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England, where I was living wild and wide woodlands when real and fade before me as rapidly as they ran after Orpheus except Virgil in his anonymous Reimer, I can recall no verse about cheese yet it has every quality which we require in exulted poetry. It is a short, strong word. It rhymes to breeze and sees an essential point. That it is emphatic and sound is admitted even by the civilization of the modern cities. For their citizens, with no apparent intention except emphasis will often say cheese it or even quite the cheese. The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient, sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple being directly derived from milk, which is one of the essential drinks not likely to be corrupted with soda water. You know, I hope, though I myself have only just thought of it, that the four rivers of Eden, or milk, water, wine and ale, a rated waters, only appeared after the fall. But cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of saw. Once in endeavoring to lecture in several places at once, I made an eccentric journey across the England, a journey of so irregular and even illogical shape that it necessitated my having lunch on four successive days in four roadside inns in four different countries. In each end, they had nothing but bread and cheese. Nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese if he can get enough of it in each. In the cheese was good, and in each in it was different. There was a noble Wensley Dale cheese in New York, Shire, a Cheshire cheese and Cheshire and so on. Now it is just here. That true poetic civilization differs from that poultry and mechanical civilization, which holds us all in bondage. Bad customs are universal and rigid. Like modern militarism, good customs are universal and varied, like native chivalry and self defense. Both the good and bad civilization cover us with a canopy and protect us from all it is outside. But a good civilization spreads over us freely, like a tree varying and yielding because it's alive. Ah, bad civilization stands up and sticks out above us like an umbrella, artificial mathematical and shape not merely universal but uniform. So it is with the contrast between the substances that vary and the substances that are the same wherever they penetrate by a wise doom of heaven. Men were commanded to eat cheese, but not the same cheese being really universal. It varies from valley to valley. But if let us say we compare cheese with soap, that vastly inferior substance, we shall see that soap tends mawr and mawr to be merely Smith's so or browns so sent automatically all over the world. If the Red Indians have soap, it's Smith soap. If the Grand Lama has soap, it's Brown's soap. There's nothing suddenly and strangely Buddhist, nothing tenderly Tibetan about his soap. I fancy the Grand Lama does not eat cheese. He's not worthy. But if he does, it's probably a local cheese having some real relation to his life and outlook. Safety matches tend foods. Patent medicines are sent all over the world, but they're not produced all over the world. Therefore, there is in them Amir Dead identity, never that soft play of slight variation, which exists in all things produced everywhere, out of the soil, in the milk of the kind or the fruits of the orchard, you can get a whiskey and soda at every outpost of the empire. That is why so many empire builders go mad. But you are not tasting or touching any environment, as in the signer of Devonshire or the grapes of the Rhine. You're not approaching nature in one of her myriad tints of mood, as in the holy act of eating cheese. When I had done my pilgrimage in the four Wayside public houses, I reached one of the great northern cities, and there I proceeded with great rapidity and complete inconsistency toe a large and elaborate restaurant where I knew I could get many other things beside bread and cheese. I could get that also, however, or at least I expected to get it. But I was sharply reminded that I had entered Babylon and left England behind. The waiter brought me cheese, indeed, but she's cut up into contemptible e small pieces, and it is the awful act that instead of Christian bread, he brought me biscuits biscuits to one who had eaten the cheese of four great countrysides biscuits to one who had proved a new for himself the sanctity of the ancient wedding between cheese and bread. I addressed the waiter in warm and moving terms. I asked him who he was, that he should put us under those whom humanity had joined, and I asked him if he did not feel as an artist that a solid but unyielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, unyielding substance like bread. To eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of modern society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice not against the waiter but against modern society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong.