The Physiology of Taste (39 page)

2.
Here was another of the Professor’s “words”:
L’ANTHRO-PONOMIE
. I do not know why I reshuffled it, except that I may at this point in the translation have felt some of the exasperation which led workers like Nimmo and Bain to label such an invention “barbarous … atrocious …”

3.
I think it was in
THE SUN ALSO RISES
that someone said, “Never be daunted in public.” I made a modish law of that when I was terrified and twenty, but I can still make an old social scar twinge and shudder, remembering the day when I was about six and told three little neighbors that I would prove to them, that very afternoon, that I could fly. I had often done so: usually it was alone, but often I took a quick turn around the dark bedroom ceiling after my little sister was asleep. I knew every sensation of freedom from the laws of gravity … The three children stood cynically, perhaps secretly ready to be envious. I jumped from a conservatively safe fifth step. But instead of the ineffably gentle breeze which I had known would flow about my bare feet, the hard stone hit them, and the children laughed, and I managed through my shock to seem not daunted. This long afterwards I can still remember, though, how it does feel to fly. I count myself fortunate.

4.
Brillat-Savarin was a strong man who lived much longer and more happily than most of his fellows, but the compassion in this sentence proves that suffering was not a stranger to him. He would indeed have made a good doctor. If he were alive today, he might well be an anesthesiologist.

5.
A few people have managed to do it, and a great many more have written, and written well, in bed. It remains for some literary-minded mattress company to make a good list of them, but meanwhile the wonderful picture of Mark Twain at work can cheer the soul of authors who might otherwise take the Professor’s dictum too seriously. Those snowy pillows, that snowy mop of hair, that look of purity and comfort!

6.
It was apparently impossible for the Professor to stop teasing, in a gently sardonic way which is typical of his nature as well as his period in history, the priests who had caused, and endured,
so much misery in France by the beginning of the nineteenth century. When he spoke of good men he admitted them as such, but in general he had little mercy for the brotherhoods, and managed quietly to imply that thanks to their fishy diets and their cold shaved pates they were a dangerous lot.

94:
WHEN A MAN
is resting, whether or not he may sleep or dream, he does not cease to be under the power of the laws of nutrition, and cannot escape the confines of the empire of gastronomy.

Theory and experience work together to prove that the quality and the quantity of food have a very strong influence on man’s labors, his sleep, and his dreams.

95: An undernourished person cannot long stand the fatigues of protracted labor; his body becomes covered with sweat; soon his strength evaporates with it, and for him a state of repose is nothing more than the impossibility of further activity.

If it is a question of mental labor, his ideas are born without either vigor or clarity; he lacks the power to reflect on them or the judgment to analyze them; his brain exhausts itself thus futilely, and he falls asleep on the battlefield.

I have always thought that the famous suppers at Auteuil, as well as those served at Rambouillet and Soissons,
¹
had a great influence on the authors of the time of Louis XIV, and the sharp-tongued Geoffroy may not have been so mistaken (if the fact were true) when he taunted the poets of the end of the eighteenth century for drinking sugar water, which he insisted was their favorite potion.

According to this theory I have looked at the works of certain authors known to have been poor and unhealthy, and I must confess that I have seen few signs of real energy in them except
when they have plainly been stimulated by self-complaint, or by a feeling of envy which was often badly disguised.

On the contrary, a man who eats well and who repairs his bodily losses with wisdom and discernment can withstand more exertion than any other living creature.

On the evening of the Emperor Napoleon’s departure for Boulogne, he worked steadily for more than thirty hours, both with his Council of State and with the various heads of departments, on no more than two very short meals and a few cups of coffee.
²

Brown
³
speaks of a clerk in the British Admiralty who, having lost by accident some state papers which he alone could duplicate, spent fifty-two consecutive hours rewriting them. Never in the world would this have been possible without an appropriate diet. He carried it out in the following way: first he drank water, then ate light dishes; then he took some wine, and then concentrated broths, and finally opium.

And one time I met an official messenger whom I had known in the army, and who had just arrived from Spain, where he had been sent on an urgent mission by our government (
CORREO GANANDO HORAS.—SP
.);
⁴
he had made the trip in twelve days, stopping only four hours in Madrid; a few glasses of wine and a few cups of bouillon, and there you have all that he touched during this long series of jolting days and sleepless nights; and he added that more solid food would have made him completely incapable of continuing his journey.
⁵

96: Diet has no less influence upon sleep and dreams.

Anyone who needs to eat cannot sleep; the torment in his stomach imprisons him in a wretched wakefulness, and if perchance weakness and exhaustion force him to doze, his sleep is light, troubled, and patchy.

On the contrary, anyone who has overstepped the limits of discretion in his meal falls immediately into absolute slumber: if he dreams in it, he will not remember, because the nervous fluid will have been utterly confused in its passage along the various
canals. For the same reason his awakening is rude: he returns with difficulty to his social existence, and when his sleepiness has quite disappeared he will still feel for a long time the inconveniences of digestion.

It can be stated as a general maxim that coffee repels sleep. Habit can weaken and even wipe out completely this troublesome hazard; but invariably it occurs when Europeans first drink the brew. Some foods, on the contrary, lead agreeably to sleep: among such are all those made predominantly of milk, the whole family of lettuces, poultry, the succulent purslane, orange-flower water, and above all the rennet or dessert apples, when they are eaten just before one goes to bed.
⁶

97: Experience, based on millions of observations, has taught us that diet determines our dreams.

In general, all foods which are mildly excitant make us dream: among such are the red meats, pigeons, duck, venison, and especially hare.

This quality is also recognized in asparagus, celery, truffles, highly flavored candies, and especially vanilla.

It would be a great mistake to believe that we should banish from our tables whatever is thus troubling, for the dreams which result are in general very pleasant and light, and may prolong life even when it seems to be suspended and least real.

There are some people for whom sleep is an existence apart, a kind of prolonged novel, which is to say that their dreams have sequence to them, so that they can end one night what they had begun to dream the night before, and recognize many faces in their dreams which they have already seen there, and which they still have never beheld in actual life.

98: Any man who has thought seriously about his physical existence, and who leads it according to the principles which we are here outlining, is one who prepares himself sensibly for his repose, his sleep, and his dreams.

He divides his work so that he will never overtire himself at it; he makes it lighter by giving it a certain variety, and he refreshes his taste for it by short intervals of rest which relax him without interrupting that continuity of his labors which is so often essential.

If, during the day, a longer period of rest is necessary to him, he never yields to it except in a sitting position; he refuses to go to sleep, unless he is irresistibly conquered by it, and above all he never permits himself to form the habit of nap-taking.

When night has brought with it the time of natural repose, he retires to a well-ventilated room, does not surround himself with curtains which would force him to breathe the same air a hundred times, and takes care not to close his shutters completely, so that whenever his eyes half open he may be comforted by a soft glow of light.
⁷

He stretches himself out on a bed whose head is slightly raised; his pillow is of horsehair; his nightcap is of linen; his breast is not crushed under a pile of heavy blankets, but he takes care that his feet are warmly covered.

He has eaten with discernment, and has not refused whatever was either good or extra-good; he has drunk of the better and, with precaution, even the best wines. At the end of the repast he has talked more of flirtations than of politics, and he has quoted more gay songs than epigrams; he has taken a cup of coffee, if his make-up permits it, and has accepted, after a few seconds’ hesitation, a tiny glass of liqueur, solely to please his palate. In everything he has shown himself as a pleasant companion, and an appreciative guest, and still he has but lightly overstepped the limits of plain thirst and hunger.

In this state he goes to bed, content with himself and his fellows. His eyes close. He dozes through the dusk of sleep, and then for a few hours lies in complete unconsciousness.

Before long Nature has accepted its due; assimilation has made up the bodily losses. Then pleasant dreams come, to lead him into a mysterious existence; he sees people he loves, once more plays his favorite games, and finds himself transported to lands where he was happy long ago.

Finally he feels sleep withdrawing from him by degrees, and
he goes back to society without once regretting the lost time, because even while he was asleep he enjoyed activity without fatigue and pleasures without fear of pain or censure.

1.
These were all gathering-places of celebrated men of letters and intellectual aristocrats, from the time of Molière (1622–1673) in Auteuil through the residence in Soissons of Olympia Mancini. A general air of “plain living and high thinking” seems to have reigned in the salons of that period, but it was especially in Rambouillet, the most famous of them from 1646 until 1665, that Catherine de Vivonne-Pisani’s suppers were “more renowned for their flow of reason and their feast of soul,” than for their gastronomical delights.

2.
Any man must know the devil he plays with. Once he has acknowledged his respect he can as often as not emerge victor in a bout with time and sleeplessness, as did Napoleon.

The opposite of this shrewd balance is a man who in 1935 had to drive from Hollywood to New York in an impossibly short time to satisfy the impossibly long ego of his employer. Tablets of benzedrine were being sold by any druggist in those innocent days, and the man bought a bottleful, and as he grew tireder on the long, hungry, sleepless haul across Texas in his little Ford he popped pill after pill of the new drug into his mouth. The car hurtled on.

Suddenly on the flat desert he was driving through a gap, in high blue mountains, so narrow that the sides hit his car with inaudible shrieks and crashings, and then ahead of him a house floated crosswise, and a monstrous purple man with a foaming mastiff straddled the road, straining to leap.

The driver went through them as through fog, every nerve in him assaulted and outraged and shocked. He stopped the little car as best he could, and on the roadside poured a flask of water over his head, and at the next town he went to a hotel, bathed, slept, and bought a train ticket to New York, while his Ford and the half-empty bottle of pills sat in a garage.

This was, to him at least, a good example of human stupidity
in not weighing the power of the stimulant against the condition of the body to be stimulated. Napoleon before Boulogne knew not only the importance of his sleeplessness to his own fate and Europe’s, but the comparative strengths of his nerves and his chosen drug. The man in the Ford forgot his potentialities and weaknesses in the uncharted possibilities of a new toy.

3.
Dr. Thomas Brown (1778–1820) was a professor of note at the University of Edinburgh, especially for his
LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE HUMAN MIND
.

4.
Here is another sample of the “five living languages” the Professor admitted to speaking “more or less well.” For some reason he never identified Italian as such, but he was fairly meticulous about labeling Spanish and German.

5.
When Lindbergh flew solo over the Atlantic Ocean in May, 1927, he took five sandwiches with him. But in the 33½ hours he was alone in his plane, he ate only one and a half of them. And two years later people in France were still shaking their heads incredulously over the freakish fact that once on the ground again he spurned the champagne that spouted in fountains in his honor, but instead had some cold milk and a roll, before he went to bed.

6.
Francis Bacon once wrote: “These procure quiet sleep: violets; lettuce, especially boiled; syrup of dried roses; saffron; balm; apples, at our going to bed.”

7.
When I first lived in France, more than a hundred years after this sensible advice was first published, I was severely scolded for opening my windows, much less my shutters, after dark. The night air was bad, my landlady told me; it was laden with a thousand germs which could not stand sunlight and must wait until then to pounce on me … It was not for many months, when I had grown to know her peculiar stinginess (and like her in proportion), that I realized she had less than no interest in what black pox filled my chamber, but that she could not stand the thought of letting good warm air escape … air that it cost energy and even a few sous to heat!