Abundance

“…..For life ought to be rich and abundant and full of love.

A piece of bread and butter should have a thick, carefully-spread layer of yellow butter, smoothed on top and trimmed at the sides so that none overlaps; that is the correct and heartening yellow bed on which your cheese ought to be laid. And that cheese must be thick-you must never use a cheese-plane, only a knife. White cheese should be an inch thick and preferably just slightly over the edge of the bread, like a solid, flat roof.

That achieved, you must regard your handiwork with reverence and consider whether or not to top it with a sprig of parsley, a drop pf tomato purée, a little chutney or a radish. Perhaps you will decide to let the cheese grace the bread alone, in solitary majesty-as you always must when it is Gruyère-but the idea of adding an extra, decorative love token must have been considered.

A piece of bread and butter must overflow with joy and enthusiasm, with generosity and love. People who save on food, who scrape their butter and plane their cheese, show thereby that they have killed their own sense of life and its exuberance. They are the usurers, clerks and debt-collectors; they have thin hair and meager souls, hollow eyes and chests, barren loins; you will not find hope among those who scrape their butter and you will search in vain for romance and adventure among people who have a cheese-plane in their kitchen.

Every time he (Ash Burlefoot) encountered this painful niggardliness in people, Ash was filled with two conflicting emotions: one was compassion for their poverty and profound understanding for the mentality of those who for years have had to fight to make the housekeeping money go round. But the other emotion was one of violent fury, a red-hot anger at seeing the wonder of life so fraudulently profaned.

And he knew that were he ever to fall so low that he had only one crown left for himself, his wife and twelve starving children, he would not buy a large piece of cheap cheese and eke it out with the aid of a cheese-plane. He would buy a chunk of the best cheese to be got, cut it into cubes the size of a match-box and hand them round with a generous, liberal hand. After that they would die. But they would die remembering that the last thing they ate was a thick piece of good cheese: good and thick.

He was fully and firmly convinced of the enormous importance of food and love for human happiness. He was twenty years old and did not know how right he was, and it was strange to think what would have happened if he had been appointed head of the official health service.

Much would have been different in Norway if he had. And much would have been different in his own life."

'Lasso Round the Moon' by Agnar Mykle