-adapted by the author from the original in Portuguese: medium.com/refeição-a-sós; also: https://mineiromatuto.com (Parte IV-Epifania)
Epiphany is an open process. Self revelations can occur at any time. Sole eating may be a conducive moment for that, just like any other. Think of the sublime motion of the cellos in the third movement-adagio molto cantabile of Beethoven’s Nineth: a poem by Fernando Pessoa; Ruben´s The Holy Family; Eisntein`s theories on relativity, with its gravitational waves and the evidence of the universe being curved, therefore finite; the fresh air on a mountain top or at the seaside, or the electrifying dance of Elektra. We, however, cannot do without food, can we? So why not take advantage of eating and take it as moment, an occasion of self-fulfilment, besides body fulfilment?
Especially if you are eating alone. There you are, at the center-stage of a play, a lonely star where you are granted the whole universe, curved or not, finite or not, for you to explore, engage in, and eventually to better understand your place in it –or not; well, maybe even to get away from it.
Yes, someone will say, but what about fasting? I take it, but extremes are said to like each other. They mingle goodly. Not uncommon to hear the reference to fasting as « the ultimate diet».
We are not dealing here with Scheherazade, and the wonderful stories of the Arabian nights you have to tell Xarir so that he may spare your life while, and only while, he listens. Xarir, the Sultan who has power of life and death over you, just like editors in moderns times: try not to please them with a good story!
The lonely eater is ascetic by nature. Great narratives do not contemplate the idea of eating alone. Take Hamlet, for example. His great monologues, his hesitations do not contemplate eating, let alone sole eating. Ours here, on the contrary, may be a stale, flat and unprofitable narrative, but is an equally authentic one, focused on the hidden overtures for transcendental pleasures that sole eating can provide.
So, thinking and eating seem separate things, but only apparently. It depends on how and what you think. The baroque period can be of help here, with its «personal affections». For sure, Shakespeare´s Othello traverses from the most transcendental and affectionate love to the most hideous crime without eating a single olive. Pure thinking, conjectures, in between, instigated by Iago out of a drama that deep down is political. Incidentally, I, for myself, tend to think that Iago never existed but in Othello`s mind.
Julius Caesar´s comments to Mark Anthony are premonitory about Caius Cassius´s thin complexion and his tendency to conspire:
«Let me have men about me that are fat; Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’nights. Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look; He thinks too much: such men are dangerous»
Shakespeare, W. Julius Caesar, Act I, 192.
Then, again, in a non-baroque perspective, what of Jesus Christ; a man of thought and of action? Was He a lean man? Irrelevant, right? Looks as if one were asking about the colour of His skin. But the Gospel is full of passages related to eating and drinking, not least the Last Supper. I have already argued here that Jesus was a Lonely Eater on that occasion, in the sense that He and His disciples, even as they ate together, could not be on the same mental plane.
There is a simple key in order to distinguish the connection between eating alone and transcendental thinking and pleasures: in a gregarious meal, talking tends to be imperative, and reigns over thinking, whereas during a lonely meal, thinking is the dominant chord, and is not hostage to words. It is melismatic: lots of music out of a single syllable. Thinking is free and we are free to think, as a Brazilian philosopher and humorist, Millôr Fernandes, used to say. We can think and see our entire life in less than a second, as they say people dying do; just imagine how many books one would want to write to tell the same story of one´s life in words. In this sense, we are prisoners of words. Not, however, during a lonely meal. Yes, heil to modern linguistics, with Saussure, and predecessors, like Locke. Every lonely eater should praise them.
