Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Venus At The Mirror, 1613-14, private collection.
115. Fattening Régime
Every thin woman wishes to put on flesh; this is an ambition that has been confided to us a thousand times. It is therefore as a final tribute to the all-powerful sex that we shall not look for means of replacing by real shapes those artificial charms, in silk or cotton, which may be seen lavishly displayed in the fashion shops, to the great scandal of the prudish, who pass by horrified and avert their gaze from these chimeras with as much and more care than if the reality was visible to their eyes.
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Diana and Callisto, 1639, Prado Museum, Madrid.
Text: Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, The Philosopher in the Kitchen, tr. Anne Drayton, New York, Penguin, 1970.
Paul Anka: Diana (Link)
Television: Venus (Link)
I think it's a sign of the tobogganing culture trajectory of the times that this great gastronomic essayist's most notable contemporary influence is said to be Iron Chef Kaga.
ReplyDeleteThe most interesting mental adventure I've had in a while was the trip through that sentence of Brillat-Savarin's. Can it be that the human mind ceased to be able to create such sentences at some unnoticed moment c. 200 years ago?
(Must admit the big popsicle type helps a lot, the eyeball hemorrhaging has made these nocturnal reading adventures a bit spotty of late.)
This enlightened gastronomic essayist evokes in me, daft as I am, thoughts of Epicureanism and Rome (the series).
But those were the days when walking on water could not yet be built in a day.
I rediscovered this last weekend during one of our endless bouts of house-cleaning connected to hopes of house-selling. Caroline presented it to me along with a long-forgotten, extremely accurate "Caliper" psychological profile that an executive coach wrote up on me a long time ago, plus some sad diaristic documents of past family history. I finally brought myself to discard the family stuff, I'm pleased to say. Funny the way progress sometimes can be made. Anne Drayton's translation of this work is really terrific. I'd like to find out more about her. And I think the type is just going to keep getting bigger. Curtis
DeleteJust don't let the animals of the household hear you so much as whisper the word "move", Curtis.
ReplyDeleteDespite what my wife and daughter would contend, I'm essentially a mute in the home. It's they and the other animals who speak, audibly (to me, at least) think, and hold the floor. But that's ok. I get a lot of quiet thinking done. Curtis
DeleteWise man. Polite deference. Safe policy.
ReplyDeleteThanks. When this part of life's transit is concluded, i.e., when I stop practicing law, I've decided to hobby-concentrate on hypnosis. I'm announcing this news today and only in this venue. They'll never know. Still waters run very deep. The Truth Game arrived yesterday, which was wonderful. Curtis
DeleteNever know who might be listening.
ReplyDeleteMy ancestors were given to the phrase, dropped into conversation meaningfully whenever anything was being said which might have seemed a venture into troublous waters for the eavesdropping child, "even the walls have ears".
The walls do, of course, have active and passive ears. Our house is quite old and has thick walls and Jane hears, without intending to, I'm certain, all kinds of things from our room. We hear less from hers because, unlike us, she doesn't talk to herself. Sound travels through other parts of this house in strange ways also, like in a whispering gallery. (Speaking of which, I'll be taking Jane next month to my favorite whispering gallery, which is in the Maparium in the Christian Science Center in Boston; the Maparium is a true wonder of the world.) One of my most painful experiences, one which many people share, I expect, was hearing something unkind said about me from the adjacent room when I lived in a very cramped, thin-walled, dormitory during high school. I shouldn't have cared, but one always does at that age. It's funny -- I absolutely wouldn't care if it happened to me now. No school today -- it's Rosh Hashana -- so we're off to improve Jane's computer equipment. Over the summer she studied in a very fine computer graphics course at the University of Pennsylvania Engineering School and she seems very keen on pursuing this in the future. It can take you in a lot of directions, obviously, and all of them seem good to me. Currently, she'd like to design cars, but we'll see. Penn has a leading program in digital media design (DMD) and everyone there looks happy and highly employable, unlike at Swarthmore, our alma mater, where they seem busy (he said lightly) defining deviancy downward, adding blandness as they go. Curtis
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