Observations placeholder
William Makepeace Thackeray - Memorials of Gourmandising June 1841
Identifier
013355
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Sir,
Respect your dinner, idolise it, enjoy it properly. You will be by many hours in the week, many weeks in the year and many years in your life, the happier if you do.
Don't tell me it is not worthy of a man. All a man's senses are worthy of employment and should be cultivated as a duty. The senses are the arts. What glorious feasts does nature prepare for your eye in animal form, in landscape and in painting!
Are you to put out your eyes and not see?
What royal dishes does her bounty provide for you in the shape of poetry, music, whether windy or wiry, notes of the human voice, or ravishing songs of birds. Are you to stuff your ears with cotton and vow that the sense of hearing is unmanly?
You obstinate dolt you!!
No surely.
Nor must you be so absurd as to fancy that the art of eating is in any way less worthy than the other two. You like your dinner, man! Never be ashamed to say so.
If you don't like your victuals, pass on to the next article, but remember that every man who has been worth a fig in this world as poet, painter or musician, has had a good appetite and a good taste.