The Appetite of Earth
I was walking the other day in a kitchen garden, which I find has somehow
got attached to my premises, and I was wondering why I liked it.
After a prolonged spiritual self-analysis I came to the conclusion
that I like a kitchen garden because it contains things to eat.
I do not mean that a kitchen garden is ugly; a kitchen garden
is often very beautiful. The mixture of green and purple on
some monstrous cabbage is much subtler and grander than the mere
freakish and theatrical splashing of yellow and violet on a pansy.
Few of the flowers merely meant for ornament are so ethereal
as a potato. A kitchen garden is as beautiful as an orchard;
but why is it that the word "orchard" sounds as beautiful as
the word "flower-garden," and yet also sounds more satisfactory?
I suggest again my extraordinarily dark and delicate discovery:
that it contains things to eat.
The cabbage is a solid; it can be approached from all sides at once;
it can be realized by all senses at once. Compared with that
the sunflower, which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing
painted on a flat wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity
of things that can only be uttered by the metaphor of eating.
To express the cubic content of a turnip, you must be all round it
at once. The only way to get all round a turnip at once is to eat
the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has loved solidity,
the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the firmness
of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things to eat.
If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white firwood
were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread:
but there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles,
certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my
teeth were stronger.
Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal
appetite declared that the moon was made of green cheese.
I never could conscientiously accept the full doctrine.
I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon is made of cheese
I have believed from childhood; and in the course of every month
a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of it.
This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary
to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree
actually contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because
if the moon were made of green cheese it would be inhabited;
and second because if it were made of green cheese it would be green.
A blue moon is said to be an unusual sight; but I cannot think
that a green one is much more common. In fact, I think I have seen
the moon looking like every other sort of cheese except a green cheese.
I have seen it look exactly like a cream cheese: a circle of warm
white upon a warm faint violet sky above a cornfield in Kent.
I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese, rising a dull red
copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur. I have seen it
look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an ordinary sensible
Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked and ruinous-looking,
so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere cheese,
that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it,
as if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and
unearthly cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green;
and I incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough.
The moon, like everything else, will ripen by the end of the world;
and in the last days we shall see it taking on those volcanic
sunset colours, and leaping with that enormous and fantastic life.
But this is a parenthesis; and one perhaps slightly lacking in
prosaic actuality. Whatever may be the value of the above speculations,
the phrase about the moon and green cheese remains a good example
of this imagery of eating and drinking on a large scale.
The same huge fancy is in the phrase "if all the trees were bread
and cheese," which I have cited elsewhere in this connection;
and in that noble nightmare of a Scandinavian legend, in
which Thor drinks the deep sea nearly dry out of a horn.
In an essay like the present (first intended as a paper to be read
before the Royal Society) one cannot be too exact; and I will concede
that my theory of the gradual vire-scence of our satellite is to be
regarded rather as an alternative theory than as a law finally
demonstrated and universally accepted by the scientific world.
It is a hypothesis that holds the field, as the scientists say
of a theory when there is no evidence for it so far.
But the reader need be under no apprehension that I have suddenly
gone mad, and shall start biting large pieces out of the trunks
of trees; or seriously altering (by large semicircular mouthfuls)
the exquisite outline of the mountains. This feeling for expressing
a fresh solidity by the image of eating is really a very old one.
So far from being a paradox of perversity, it is one of the oldest
commonplaces of religion. If any one wandering about wants to have
a good trick or test for separating the wrong idealism from the right,
I will give him one on the spot. It is a mark of false religion
that it is always trying to express concrete facts as abstract;
it calls sex affinity; it calls wine alcohol; it calls brute starvation
the economic problem. The test of true religion is that its energy
drives exactly the other way; it is always trying to make men feel
truths as facts; always trying to make abstract things as plain
and solid as concrete things; always trying to make men, not merely
admit the truth, but see, smell, handle, hear, and devour the truth.
All great spiritual scriptures are full of the invitation not to test,
but to taste; not to examine, but to eat. Their phrases are full
of living water and heavenly bread, mysterious manna and dreadful wine.
Worldliness, and the polite society of the world, has despised
this instinct of eating; but religion has never despised it.
When we look at a firm, fat, white cliff of chalk at Dover, I do not
suggest that we should desire to eat it; that would be highly abnormal.
But I really mean that we should think it good to eat; good for
some one else to eat. For, indeed, some one else is eating it;
the grass that grows upon its top is devouring it silently,
but, doubtless, with an uproarious appetite.
