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239 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1996
To like something is to want to ingest it, and in that sense is to submit to the world. To like something is to succumb, in a small but content-full way, to death. But dislike hardens the perimeter between the self and the world, and brings a clarity to the object isolated in its light. Any dislike is in some measure a triumph of definition, distinction, and discrimination–a triumph of life
“Perhaps the closest analogy is with the Arts: in the course of a lifetime’s engagement with any one of them one goes through periods of boredom, ennui, anomie, dejà vu, its-all-been-doneness; but then just as exhaustion and fatigue are beginning to set in, just as one grows certain that the full familiarity with all possible excitements has been attained, one comes across a new voice or manner or technique whose effect is as revivifying as the discovery of a despaired-of cache of supplies by an Arctic explorer; thus the intrepid polar explorer is spared from having to settle down and feast on his own huskies. Similarly, the discovery of a new artist is a discovery of new resources: one’s first encounter with Mallarmé or late Beethoven.”Yes Yes. We got it a while ago back on page 3. Such waggish sarcasm. Wonderfully tasteful wit. Erudite, prim ripping-the-pish. Yer man’s not what he seems. Fancy that now, Ted!!! You’re the same exactly, the same kind of schnidey bollix that goes to restaurants and sneers at the less well-off, less knowledgeable, less ‘erudite’ because, in fact, you are the creation you are taking the piss out of.
We then sat down to a meal which Dante would have hesitated to invent. I was seated opposite my parents, between a spherical house matron and a silent French assistant. The first course was a soup in which pieces of undisguised and unabashed gristle floated in a mud-coloured sauce whose texture and temperature were powerfully reminiscent of mucus. Then a steaming vat was placed in the middle of the table, where the jowly, watch-chained headmaster presided. He plunged his serving arm into the vessel and emerged with a ladleful of hot food, steaming like fresh horse dung on a cold morning. For a heady moment I thought I was going to be sick. A plate of soi-disant cottage pie – the mince grey, the potato beige – was set in front of me.
‘The boys call this “mystery meat”,’ confided matron happily. I felt the assistant flinch. Other than that I don’t remember (I can’t imagine) what we talked about, and over the rest of the meal – as Swinburne’s biographer remarked, à propos an occasion when his subject had misbehaved during a lecture on the subject of Roman sewage systems – ‘the Muse of history must draw her veil’.