Best known for his autobiographical studies of English village life in Cider with Rosie and As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, Laurie Lee also wrote poems, plays, essays, and travel books. In this excerpt from the essay "Appetite," Lee uses a then-and-now comparison to illustrate his thesis: "One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to protect it."
from "Appetite"*
by Laurie Lee
Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should arrange to give up our pleasures regularly--our food, our friends, our lovers--in order to preserve their intensity, and the moment of coming back to them. For this is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves. Sailors and travelers enjoyed this once, and so did hunters, I suppose. Part of the weariness of modern life may be that we live too much on top of each other, and are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were separated by hunger both from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off hunting, and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty of men for days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The women crouched by the fire, the wet smoke in their eyes; the children wailed; everybody was hungry. Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs from the hills, and the men came back loaded with meat. This was the great reunion, and everybody gorged themselves silly, and appetite came into its own; the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, too easy and regular, served up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don’t know the pleasure of being hungry any more.
Too much of anything--too much music, entertainment, happy snacks, or time spent with one’s friends--creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember. Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager and not too much blunted.
Selected Works by Laurie Lee:
- The Sun, My Monument, poems (1944)
- Cider with Rosie, memoir (1959)
- Pocket Poems (1960)
- As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning, memoir (1969)
- I Can't Stay Long, essays (1975)
- A Moment of War, memoir (1991)
*"The essay "Appetite" by Laurie Lee appears in the collection I Can't Stay Too Long, published by Atheneum in 1976.
