Читать книгу The Observations of Professor Maturin онлайн

5 страница из 38

Explaining that he would have the author convince me, rather than himself, he indicated yet another paragraph: “What praise can be refused the science which sustains us from the cradle to the grave, which entrances the delights of love and the pleasures of friendship, which disarms hatred, makes business easier, and affords us, during the short voyage of our lives, the only enjoyments that both relieve us from fatigue and themselves entail none!”

“Take it, and read it,” he said, as I looked up. “I know it by heart.” I gladly accepted the volume, for there was here evidently more than appeared; but I also expressed the wish that he would, himself, first tell me more about it; and this, retaking the book, his own dinner being now finished and mine but about to begin, he proceeded to do.

“I should not need to remind you,” he began, “that I am no friend to indulgence, much less to so gross a form as over-feeding, nor to speak of my known antagonism to every form of ignorance—except to explain that it is for these reasons that I have become an earnest advocate of gastronomy, which endeavors to transform eating from the ignorant indulgence it usually is to a reasonable science of nutrition and a refined art of enjoyment. Whatever popular disesteem the science and the art still suffer is due either to ignorance of its serious endeavor, or to a Puritanic attitude that is both inconsistent and irreverent. The fabric of nature is so constituted that all of our essential processes are accompanied by pleasure; a thoroughly consistent ascetic would necessarily cease to exist.