The food

Someone of his friends had something of a diet in which he refrained from a few foods and lost the weight he’d wanted without effort.

“I simply eliminated alcohol and dairy and sweets and bread,” he’d said, “and I shed the weight. Eleven pounds in two months, although during the time, I had been traveling in Europe.”

Well, it was an issue, Frank thought. His wife was fat. As was her mother. And his father was fat. And his grandfather.

His uncle, who had told the story, had been traveling in Britain, which, Frank thought, lessened the merit of his fast, as who had ever praised Britain for food?

He thought about his uncle’s pride, and wondered how much of it had to do with action contrary to what, for want of a better word, he thought of as “Jewishness.”

And, if the people were gross, if they so thought of themselves, was it not caused, this condition—if the condition was the thought or if obesity—by their displacedness?

Aha, he thought.

Though slim himself, though slender, though disposed to equate it with royalty, and though disposed to feel superior to his relatives, over those he knew, Jew and Gentile alike, who fretted over their weight, he fought the urge to consider himself chosen; and he wondered: might it not be a fear of the outcast? Might it not be the self-loathing, he thought, of the displaced—that their very metabolism would not function to allow them to assimilate food in a foreign land?

“The very foods we eat,” he thought.

The jailer scraped his key along the bars as he came down the gallery.

“Yes, All right,” Frank thought—and there was something comforting in the sound.

“‘Royally slim,’” he thought, “although I know they called me sickly. And turned on me for it. Slim. Slight. Slender. Girlish.” He shuddered.

“Or, in Arctic climes,” he thought, “there it would be a disadvantage definitely. Where the body’s urge to put on flesh would serve one. And the opposite not do one well. But in the South …”

Down the row, there was a quick conversation in undertones. The guard and a prisoner down the row, talking.

The guard responded, not unkindly, from the tone, to the request, whatever it was. Then Frank heard another brief exchange—almost an exchange of pleasantries—between the two, and then the guard moved on, dragging his key on the bars as he moved from cell to cell for the evening lockdown.

“But in the South you would think it was an advantage,” Frank thought. “I always found it so—not to be disposed, for example, to sweat.”

The guard was at his cell, and he heard the key rasping on the bars, and then the quick tack-thik, as the key went into the lock. And then he was locked down for the night.

“No. I will not think of fire,” he thought. “In fact, its opposite is Cold of the North, and the Eskimos I have just fortuitously touched upon. Though they themselves are slight. But muscled. And disposed, I think, to brawn. To a brawn tempered by cold—so that, perhaps, it’s accurate to call them slight.

“I would think they’re of a type similar to their dogs, as both have been bred both by the climate in which they live and by their exertions in that climate.”

He tried to think whether any species fell outside of this description, and could only offer himself, transplanted.

They were late with his food.

“All right,” he thought. “I have to learn the difference between defending my position and promoting my interests.”

“I am entitled to my food, and a case could be made for demanding it on time this time, to ensure compliance in the future. And that would be an attempt—for who can say it would succeed?—to defend my position.

“But would it promote my interest?

“First,” he thought, “Is it worth fighting for? And, then, is it worth … No. No,” he thought. “It is all contained in the first question. That is the question: ‘Is it worth fighting for?’

“That is the question of the philosopher who is not afraid to seem foolish. Who is not afraid to be thought weak. Who can rest content with his own opinion of himself—for it is myself I must conquer, and he who conquers himself is due more praise than he who takes a city. For if I can still my longing to be thought well of, then …

“And I am not hungry,” he thought. “Finally, I don’t want the food now. I do not require it. I require to be thought well of.

“Then what kind of beast am I—for they have kidnapped me and will surely kill me, who would strive to defend his—no, I will not say it,” he thought—“manhood by demanding the food be brought him at the appointed time.

“Are all quests for recognition similarly vain?” he thought; and, as he did, they brought the food.

One man opened the cell, while the other man stood back with the pump shotgun. The man with the tray came in and set it on the bench. As he bent down, he flicked his eyes up to look at the prisoner. Then he backed out, and the cell was locked. Frank heard the two men walk away.

“He smells of cabbage,” he thought.

“The cell still smells of cabbage, and it’s from that fellow. Looks like a sausage. And where is it written I must love my neighbor?”

He looked at the tray. He picked the small bench up and put it next to his bunk. He sat on the bunk and began to eat.

“No. Where do we find we must love our neighbor? No. We must treat them well,” he thought, and found that he was pointing, as if in a disputation. And he wondered if it was a “Jewish” gesture, and a “Jewish” trait. And he wondered, “What does that mean?” And he thought, “You know what that means.”

He ate his meal, happy to find he was hungry for it.