A Deceptive Clarity

Every self-respecting person with intellectual pretensions has a favorite small hotel in Bloomsbury, especially self-respecting intellectuals who are traveling on a budget.

Health or ethical grounds?” I asked.

“Both. Why eat all that cholesterol, and why slaughter cows or pigs or sheep when there are a lot of other ways to get protein?” He gave me the kind of look civilized beings reserve for carnivores, then said abruptly, “Hey, how about some fried chicken? There’s a Wienerwald a couple of blocks from here.”

I laughed. “Sure, but what have you got against chickens?”

He looked at me as if he couldn’t believe I’d ask so self-evident a question. “They’re ugly.”

People understandably assume that anything erected during the Renaissance was a work of art, but of course that isn’t so, any more than it is so that something built in the twentieth century is necessarily ugly, although there you’d have a better case.

It is rare to pass three pedestrians in a row without noticing that at least one of them is chewing on something that looks, sounds, and smells delicious. If they have to walk more than 150 feet without sight of a bakery or a Schnell lmbiss—a hot-snack stand—they become perceptibly anxious, even panicky.

In Germany it is hard to be hungry for long without realizing it. The Germans are surely the munchingest people in the world.

(I’m still waiting for someone to explain neoplastic constructivism to me, for example, and I’ve lectured on the damn thing!

The potatoes were crisp, the gemischter Salat aggressively Teutonic—not thrown together willy-nilly, French-style, but with the marinated vegetables set in orderly ranks, each in its place.