On not living in America

There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to regret that he does not live in America. For me that time is approximately five o’clock weekdays. When that feeling strikes the best cure is to get me to the America-themed bar just one train stop away from home. Faux-leather red booths, brass rails, big red hanging lights, plastic menus and ketchup bottles on every table, sports games on TV screens above the bar, walls plastered with sports regalia and American kitsch.

There, amid all that American glory, I find a seat, I solemnly contemplate a pint of American pale ale, I order something from the menu, barbecue beef ribs or burgers with onion rings or buffalo wings with celery sticks and blue cheese dipping sauce. Why is it so hard to get blue cheese sauce outside the fifty states? Long have I pondered the question but the answer still evades me. All I know is that at five o’clock I can walk through the doors and ask for buffalo wings and they will be brought to me on a platter with a dipping dish of blue cheese sauce.

If I am able to look up from studying my buffalo wings I see, on the big flat screen above me, the men in white throwing the ball and hitting it and running and catching and again throwing the ball. I have never been to a baseball game, it is not something I have ever liked or understood. But I feel a certain ineffable contentment to see them playing while I sit here with my honey-coloured pale ale gleaming in the glass and the blue cheese dipping sauce dripping from my fingers. I watch them hitting and running and catching and I raise a buffalo wing to my waiting lips and say to myself: America.

If I lived in America then I suppose, at a certain hour of the afternoon, I would seek out a glass of Australian lager although it is a drink I never really liked. In time I would be brought to such a pitch of nostalgia that I would even go out of my way to get my hands on that most ubiquitous and most repulsive of all Australian foods, the corner store meat pie. And as I raised my beer glass with pie-stained greasy fingers I would gaze up at the big flat screen to see the men in white standing around doing nothing, which is to say playing cricket, a game that I have never really liked or understood, and with a proud tear in my eye I would say to myself: Australia.

But I am already in Australia. So today the pale ale is bubbling in my soul as I lean back into my red faux-leather seat and slowly, with infinite deliberation, eat America, one blue cheese-dipped buffalo wing at a time.

Ice cream as an index of spiritual life: a note on Pope Francis' favourite film

Pope Francis' interview last week attracted a storm of media commentary. Apparently what everyone found interesting were his remarks about homosexual relationships and so forth. But what intrigued me most was a deeper and more important doctrinal matter: I refer to the Pope's comments about movies. As it turns out, the Holy Father’s favourite film is not (as had previously been reported) Babette's Feast, but Fellini's 1954 film La Strada.

These two movies have one thing in common. Each one, in its own way, sees eating as an index of spiritual life. In Babette's Feast, a meal becomes the occasion of joy, grace, forgiveness, salvation. Just as Babette's ingredients are transformed into a work of art, so the hearts of those who sit at her table are transfigured as the meal unfolds. Their ability to respond to food and drink becomes an index of their ability to respond to one another – to forgive old grievances, acknowledge old loves, reconcile themselves to failed hopes, and, in sum, to see all life's painful contradictions embraced by an infinite mercy.

La Strada is also a story about grace. But it is about grace rejected. The film charts the moral and spiritual degradation of the strongman Zampano, played by Anthony Quinn. Zampano responds with cruelty to the childlike innocence of Gelsomina. He beats her and rapes her. He belittles her, not realising that she is his only chance of salvation. He steals from a convent in spite of her pleading. Right in front of her eyes he strikes a clown and kills him. After the killing, Gelsomina comes unravelled and for the first time Zampano seems to see her, to be moved by her. Perhaps he has even begun to love her? But he hardens his heart to the grace that is offered him in her brokenness. While she is sleeping by the roadside he rides away, leaving her abandoned in the bitter cold.

Many scenes in La Strada involve eating and drinking. Zampano's moral decline can be charted by the meals he eats – from his first meal with Gelsomina (where he wolfs down her cooking, then calls it "shit"); to the meal at the restaurant where he gets drunk and leaves with another woman; to the last climactic meal of a solitary ice cream cone. I call it the climactic meal though it is not an obviously important scene like the great meal in Babette's Feast. It all happens in a few seconds, so quickly you could miss it. But for me it is the most poignant scene in the film. I will even say I find it one of the most spiritually disturbing moments in all cinema.

Here is what happens.

It is some years after Zampano's abandonment of Gelsomina. We see him with other circus folk. With a few abrupt words he rejects a woman's company and walks down the promenade. He stops at an ice cream vendor and buys a lemon ice cream. Walking away, he eats it – in one mouthful. The ice cream is gone in one bite. Zampano is looking about and doesn't even seem to notice what he is eating. Then a moment later he stuffs the empty cone into his mouth and crunches it up. It is all as thoughtless and perfunctory as if he had been chewing his nails. Throughout most of the film our characters are seen eating scraps, gathering crumbs from the ground, scraping offensive-looking slop out of big tin bowls. But this is ice cream. Ice cream! The most luxurious food seen anywhere in the film. A perfect symbol of innocence, glory, the grace of childhood. After everything that has happened we can scarcely believe that Zampano is eating ice cream. 

He eats it. But he does not – because he cannot – enjoy it.

Most critics have interpreted the last scene of La Strada, where Zampano collapses weeping on the beach, as some kind of spiritual enlightenment, a promising sign of repentance and conversion. But they are wrong. Zampano is a man beyond redemption. The ice cream tells us so. All the joy has been wrung out of his life. He is so sour that for him even ice cream is not sweet. He is dead inside – dead to Gelsomina, dead to grace, dead (therefore) to the simple righteous pleasure of eating ice cream on a promenade in the sun.

Because eating is social, food and grace go together. That is what both films show. Babette's feast opens the hearts of her friends to one another (and so to God). But when Zampano hardens his heart to Gelsomina (and so to God), his heart becomes unable to respond even to ice cream. He eats with his mouth, but his heart tastes nothing. After such eating, what forgiveness?

Eating Italy: on the relation between reading and living

I have often heard of a distinction – though I have never understood it – between reading books and something called real life experience. We are, apparently, supposed to believe that reading and living are two quite different things, as opposed to one another as girls and boys or night and day. There is, we are told, a moral dualism between reading and living. One of these activities is abstract, the other is concrete. One is artificial, the other is true and real. One involves only the mind, the other involves the body.

Personally I have never accepted that dualism. Not only because it is a heresy; and not only because it is opposed to the Old Testament, which views reading as the source of living (Psalm 1); but also because my experience has disproved it a thousand times. Ever since I was a boy I have experienced reading books not as the opposite of living but as a particularly grand and intensified form of it.

Recently I read the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, a series of novels set in Alexandria in the 1930s. We were away for the holidays. We had rented a little house on an island. I sat on a cane chair reading on the wide verandah while the children played. In the first novel, Justine, I read the following sentence:

In a grocer's window I saw a small tin of olives with the name Orvieto on it, and overcome by a sudden longing to be on the right side of the Mediterranean, entered the shop: bought it: had it opened there and then: and sitting down at a marble table in that gruesome light I began to eat Italy, its dark scorched flesh, hand-modelled spring soil, dedicated vines.

I loved this sentence, especially the words "I began to eat Italy". I read it over and over. I repeated it to my family and friends. I explained it to my children. I thought about it when I lay down at night and I woke up in the morning thinking about it.

And for the past six weeks I have eaten olives every day. Not olives arranged decorously in a clean white bowl: I eat them straight from the jar, plunging my fingers in and eating them and spitting out the pits. I am not satisfied unless lunch and dinner (occasionally breakfast too) have begun in this fashion. I eat the olives because every time I bite into the dark scorched flesh it reminds me of the sentence in the novel by Lawrence Durrell. I eat the olives not just with my body but with my mind also. When my mouth chews the olives, my mind chews too.

And of all the olives I have eaten in the past six weeks, none have tasted better than the first ones, the olives I tasted when I read the sentence for the first time, sitting in a cane chair reading Lawrence Durrell in the early evening and eating Italy although I had not yet had anything to eat.

Audio: G. K. Chesterton on cheese

After dinner tonight I forced some friends to sit and listen while I read them one of my favourite G. K. Chesterton pieces: his impassioned 1910 essay on "Cheese," from the delightful collection, Alarms and Discursions. I made an audio recording of the reading, and have uploaded it here for your edification (about 6 minutes). "Cheese" is Chesterton at his glorious fat catholic best.

Prayer after a picnic breakfast with my children

Yours are the bright sun and the blue sky to which we turn our faces as we gather on the lawn. Yours is the smell of steaming pancakes and brewed coffee and fresh-mown grass. Yours is the choreography that sets the wasps dancing while the trees and the shrubs applaud.

Felicity has prepared a table for us, and You are the welcome that nearly blinds us as we squint together at the shining plates and glittering knives and forks. You are our fullness as we pile our plates with the pancakes we have made. You are our sweetness as we scoop big handfuls of sliced strawberries from the bowl. You are our overflowing bounty, our More Than Enough, as we squeeze the maple syrup from the bottle, as it oozes and dribbles over everything. You are Anna's generosity when she sees my plate and worries that I will not have enough, when she hands me her own dripping pancake and implores me to receive it. You are the swell of gratitude in Jamie's chest when, overwhelmed by all that breakfast means, he turns and smears my cheek with maple-syrup kisses.

O grain of the earth and fruit of the strawberry bush! O pancake of joy and syrup of thanksgiving! To You we lift our hearts, and our mouths are full of Your goodness. To You we raise our shining forks and smiling sticky faces, for today heaven and earth are dripping with Your glory. Light of our light, festivity of our feasting, joy of our breakfast picnic: the night's long fast is over, and we give You thanks and praise.