Food

Temperance and fasting

I drew Temperance together with The Tower—an odd combination, it seemed. I’ve always had a difficult time interpreting this particular card, but in the moment, I took it to mean something like “fasting”. The word was at that point associated for me with something like forbidding oneself from indulging in any kind of pleasurable activity, perhaps because of its association with the so-called “temperance movement”, whose naming is ironic since total abstinence is as far from temperance as total indulgence.

The fasting did not go well: for the first few of days, I ate only a small meal each day. By day three or four, I was exhausted and had lost my appetite completely. I stopped eating almost entirely. Over the following days, I became more and more tired, nauseous, and started getting an odd vertigo sensation. I could barely think and couldn’t get anything done. My throat was so dry that I could barely swallow—actually this was the worst part, even though it doesn’t sound so bad. Amazingly, until this point, I had basically forgotten that I wasn’t eating anything. I had noticed that I was feeling much worse, but I interpreted it as having caught some kind of infectious illness.

After unsuccessfully trying to treat my “illness” with over-the-counter medication, it finally occurred to me that this fasting thing may not have been such a good idea, and I slowly started forcing myself to eat real food again, and, indeed, recovered from the illness. This whole endeavor ended up mostly being a useful lesson in what the virtue of temperance is not. (In retrospect, if I were to interpret the card with respect to eating habits, the more fitting interpretation it is not as a strict fasting schedule, but more like taking small, frequent meals instead of “saving up” for one large meal near the end of the day. An irregular eating schedule.)

It’s good to be hungry and eat

I had an overwhelming urge to get away, and so decided on a whim to take a four-hour train ride to the capital on the other side of the country. I brought with me Lispector’s A Breath of Life, a notebook and some Tarot cards. I spent several hours half-panicked looking for something without knowing what I was looking for. I became more and more hungry. I had not even eaten breakfast, and now it was late in the evening. I had spent several hours walking without any breaks.

I could feel the hunger in my back; it was a feeling of my body forcefully pulling itself together. And so, I finally gave in and decided to eat a sandwich I had bought at the train station. It took me another hour or so to find a spot where I felt comfortable enough to eat, but eventually I found a small, quiet park with a bench in the dark where no one could see me.

It felt so good to eat that I cried from gratitude. I looked at the Tarot cards, and found The World on one side, and on the other, the IX of Swords. This seemed very apt to me: indeed, there had been an oppressive, hopeless, panicked sense of confusion, as in an incoherent nightmare; and then, it had all resolved itself quite simply: with what was already there. And, namely, what I had previously thought to be insignificant, if not outright hostile, namely all the distractions and suffering and passions of the world. I was grateful not so much for the food, but for the hunger, and the cold, and the melancholy.

After that, I could finally go back home. It was now around 1 AM, and I still had another four-hour train ride, and I was totally exhausted, barely able to walk. And soon I’d been awake for a full 24 hours and still had eaten only the one sandwich I bought at the train station. Still, I couldn’t fall asleep on the train around other people, so I decided to finally read A Breath of Life. Opening the book to page 58, which was where I had last stopped reading—albeit in a different book—the first paragraph was this:

I’m hungry and sad. It’s good to be a little sad. It’s a sweet feeling. And it’s good to be hungry and eat.

This is a phrase that means exactly what it says: “it’s good to be hungry and eat.” It would not be good to hungry without eating, nor to eat without being hungry. And it would not be enough to merely say, “it is good to eat when hungry.” No, for whoever first had the idea for hunger, they were a skillful discerner of what is good, since if there were no hunger, food would not be good—but if there were no food, hunger would not be good. They made exactly the right choice in both being hungry and also eating, even though it must have seemed counterintuitive to pick the two together when neither was good on its own.

Sult

As for Knut Hamsun’s book Sult (“Hunger”), I really hated this book. I don’t mean that I don’t consider it an excellent work of literature. I mean that I really hate it. Actually, it’s not so much that I hate it—rather, it hates me. It mocks me in an ironic, vaguely sadistic sort of way. And it’s not just that. It’s also that it then conceals its sadistic irony behind yet more layers of irony until it has been so well obfuscated that an unsuspecting third party may mistake it for a kind of sincere sympathy.

But I can tell that Hamsun does not really respect his character. I don’t know if he even knows this himself. Probably he does, since he was a Nazi. Or, perhaps he does not respect himself; I think that this is how people become fascists: they feel that there is a part of them that has been cut off and oppressed in the external world, but then, instead of identifying with the cut-off part and attempting to repair what has been damaged, the fascist identifies with the left-over stub—the dead part, the part that is wholly of and in the external world. They then adopt for themselves the rageful reductionist attitude of the external world and direct it, at first, inwards—but when this becomes too painful, it is instead redirected: other real humans, especially those who are the least cut off from themselves, are reduced to symbols, and they are made the victims of an externalized, literal brutality originating from an inward, symbolic brutality.

The character indeed does what he is made to do in the book—however, he does not think or feel as the book claims. Hamsun’s portrayal is off in ways that are so subtle, that even the main character himself may start to believe that it really is how he’s thinking and feeling. But it isn’t. The book never gets to the core of it, it always stays on the surface, in fact it conceals the core, it obfuscates what is really happening. The novel is deeply reductionist, but what makes it truly dangerous, compared to the numerous other such novels, is that this one appears to be exactly the opposite of what it really is, and it does so very convincingly.

I found this book disturbing. It took me a long time to get over it. Like how, if one day someone is suddenly attacked while walking around outside, they will always be on guard and never be able to feel properly safe in public again. This is how it now is for me with reading books, after having read this one. I would not recommend reading it. I dislike it, and I dislike Hamsun. If you must read it, also read Hamsun’s autobiography. There, he comes across as much more miserable and embittered, and therefore also more sympathetic.

I feel similarly about Notes from Underground—undoubtedly a good work, but Dostoevsky also has this conceitedly hateful attitude towards his characters. You wouldn’t notice it unless you’re looking for it.

On the other hand, August Strindberg’s Inferno is essentially a version of the same novel, but written with sincere empathy. I suppose it helps that it’s supposed to be autobiographical.