On Sun, 30 Jan 2000, Brad De Long wrote:
> There *is* a powerful--stoic--school of thought that holds that utopia is
> reached not by sating but by limiting desires and pleasures.
And of course, the original Epicurians reached the same conclusion (A materially simple life is best) and starting out from the same question (What is the happiest life?) but using the opposite middle: they say the path to happiness leads to the finer, i.e., non-bodily pleasures precisely because only they are limitlessness -- because there is no bodily limit to their indulgence.
Michael, who says when you need a change of pace from spinach with butter and salt, try soy sauce, dashi stock and dried bonito flakes. Same cost, really different taste. Yumm.
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
A.J. Liebling, _Between Meals_:
The Proust madeleine phenomenon is now as firmly established in folklore as Newton's apple or Watt's steam kettle. The man ate a tea biscuit, the taste evoked memories, he wrote a book. This is capable of expression by the formula TMB, for Taste > Memory > Book. Some time ago, when I began to read a book called _The Food of France_, by Waverley Root, I had an inverse experience: BMT, for Book > Memory > Taste. Happily, the tastes that _The Food of France_ re-created for me -- small birds, stewed rabbit, stuffed tripe, Cote Rotie, and Tavel -- were more robust than that of the madeleine, which Larousse defines as "a light cake made with sugar, flour, lemon juice, brandy, and eggs." (The quantity of brandy in a madeleine would not furnish a gnat with an alcohol rub.) In the light of what Proust wrote with so mild a stimulus, it is the world's loss that he did not have a heartier appetite. On a dozen Gardiners Island oysters, a bowl of clam chowder, a peck of steamers, some bay scallops, three sauteed soft-shelled crabs, a few ears of fresh-picked corn, a thin swordfish steak of generous area, a pair of lobsters, and a Long Island duck, he might have written a masterpiece. __________________________________________________________________________