W H Auden

Grub First, Then Ethics

Should the shade of Plato Visit us, anxious to know how anthropos is, we could say to him: "Well, we can read to ourselves, our use of holy numbers would shock you, and a poet may lament—'Where is Telford whose bridged canals are still a Shropshire glory where Muir who on a Douglas Spruce rode out a storm and called an earthquake noble, where Mr. Vynyian Board, thanks to whose life-long fuss the hunted whale now suffers a quicker death? '—without being called an idiot, though none of them bore arms or made a public splash," then "Look!" we would point, for a dig at Athens, "Here is the place where we cook. " Though built in Lower Austria do-it-yourself America prophetically blueprinted this palace kitchen for kingdoms where royalty would be incognito, for an age when Courtesy might think: "From your voice and the back of your neck I know we shall get on but cannot tell from your thumbs who is to give the orders. " The right note is harder to hear than in the Age of Poise when She talked shamelessly to her maid and sang noble lies with Him, but struck it can be still in New Knossos where if I am banned by a shrug it is my fault, not Father's, as it is my taste whom I put below the salt. The prehistoric hearthstone, round as a birthday-button and sacred to Granny, is as old stuff as the bowel-loosening nasal war cry, but this all-electric room where ghosts would feel uneasy, a witch at a loss, is numinous and again the centre of a dwelling not, as lately it was, an abhorrent dungeon where the warm unlaundered meiny belched their comic prose and from a dream of which chaste Milady awoke blushing. House-proud, deploring labor, extolling work, these engines politely insist that banausics can be liberals, a cook a pure artist who moves Everyman at a deeper level than Mozart, for the subject of the verb to-hunger is never a name: dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms, but the neotene who marches upright and can subtract reveals a belly like a serpent's with the same vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile, or Pigmy, he must get his calories before he can consider her profile or his own, attack you or play chess, and take what there is however hard to get down: then surely those in whose creed God is edible may call a fine omelet a Christian deed. The sin of Gluttony is ranked among the Deadly Seven, but in murder mysteries one can be sure the gourmet didn't do it: children, brave warriors out of a job, can weigh pounds more than they should and one can dislike having to kiss them yet, compared with the thin-lipped, they are seldom detestable. Some waiter grieves for the worst dead bore to be a good trencherman, and no wonder chefs mature into choleric types, doomed to observe Beauty peck at a master-dish, their one reward to behold the mutually hostile mouth and eyes of a sinner married at the first bite of a smile. The houses of our City are real enough but they lie haphazardly scattered over the earth, and Her vagabond forum is any space where two of us happen to meet who can spot a citizen without papers. So, too, can her foes. Where the power lies remains to be seen, the force, though, is clearly with them: perhaps only by falling can She become Her own Vision, but we have sworn under four eyes to keep Her up—all we ask for, should the night come when comets blaze and meres break, is a good dinner, that we may march in high fettle, left foot first, to hold her Thermopylae.