2024年3月30日发(作者：win10网卡驱动安装包)

Appetite

by Laurie Lee

One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties

should be to preserve it. Appetite is the keenness of living; it is one of the senses

that tells you that you are still curious to exist, that you still have an edge on your

longings and want to bite into the world and taste its multitudinous flavours and

juices.

By appetite, of course, I don't mean just the lust for food, but any condition of

unsatisfied desire, any burning in the blood that proves you want more than

you've got, and that you haven't yet used up your life. Wilde said he felt sorry for

those who never got their heart's desire, but sorrier still for those who did. I got

mine once only, and it nearly killed me, and I've always preferred wanting to

having since.

For appetite, to me, is this state of wanting, which keeps one's expectations

alive. I remember learning this lesson long ago as a child, when treats and orgies

were few, and when I discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in

actually eating a toffee but in gazing at it beforehand. True, the first bite was

delicious, but once the toffee was gone one was left with nothing, neither toffee

nor lust. Besides, the whole toffeeness of toffees was imperceptibly diminished by

the gross act of having eaten it. No, the best was in wanting it, in sitting and

looking at it, when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure - house of flavours.

So, for me, one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting,

not the satisfaction. In wanting a peach, or a whisky, or a particular texture or

sound, or to be with a particular friend. For in this condition, of course, I know that

the object of desire is always at its most flawlessly perfect. Which is why I would

carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting, simply

because I think that appetite is too good to lose, too precious to be bludgeoned

into insensibility by satiation and over-doing it.

For that matter, I don't really want three square meals a day -- I want one huge,

delicious, orgiastic, table-groaning blowout, say every four days, and then not be

too sure where the next one is coming from. A day of fasting is not for me just a

puritanical device for denying oneself a pleasure, but rather a way of anticipating a

rarer moment of supreme indulgence.

Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should

arrange to give up our pleasures regularly-- our food, our friends, our lovers-- in

order to preserve their intensity, and the moment of coming back to them. For this

is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves.

Sailors and travellers enjoyed this once, and so did hunters, I suppose. Part of the

weariness of modern life may be that we live too much on top of each other, and

are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were separated by hunger both

from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off

hunting, and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye.

The cave was empty of men for days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The

women crouched by the fire, the wet smoke in their eyes; the children wailed;

everybody was hungry. Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs

from the hills, and the men came back loaded with meat. This was the great

reunion, and everybody gorged themselves silly, and appetite came into its own;

the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred

celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to

cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular,

served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining

with fat, but we don't know the pleasure of being hungry any more.

Too much of anything-- too much music, entertainment happy snacks, or time

spent with one's friends, creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no

longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember. Life is short and precious, and

appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are

to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager

and not too much blunted.

It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from

putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed

-- all one needs is the original thirst.