#1

The way in which a person satisfies the need for self-justifying is among the more obvious measures of maturity attained. Youth pleads its qualities, groans them until its audiences dwindle, becomes limp and pitiful if left to itself for only a moment, then brightens again at the sight of another new someone else it can bore with its eager-beaverness. Whereas the more decrepit can take the smugger way, and have just to flaunt themselves around town as fact, silently, very, very slowly, impermanent and unpromising, far better justifying by simply having been and being than pretending there were any delicious treat beyond either.

Had I the need to justify myself – and I don’t, to anyone, least of all myself, my imagination’s too feeble, I understand none of the decisions I have made in my life, nor their consequences, so nothing to justify – it would likely be in some way half between these two, the reason being, not strangely, my age, which marks me as old enough to enjoy belittling the hopes and dreams of the younger generations, but young enough to bear the burden of an accumulation of life-force, an effervescence that, to my dismay, will take me many years to exhaust, always replenishing partially, but never entirely, with food.

I won’t bother imagining how I would go on from this first approach; it’s more interesting to think of food, a necessary evil without need of justifying, aside, for example, from those of us who blame food for their gluttony and confuse its defense with their own against the disgust they’ve aroused in others. There they confuse too the discussing and the discussed- and to justify discussing is my purpose here, to honor convention and introduce a body of text that I hope will be read with the same amount of enjoyment we have lost in sacrificing our leisure to write it and, more dismally, offer it to the public.

One of its primary topics will be food: why write about food? Or a small Balkan city where food is eaten? Given the infancy of the text, now three paragraphs old, excuse me if I avoid these questions to avoid answers that from the vantage of posterity, of vast length, richness, insight, would nibble at my sense of shame; then the silliness of our insisting upon ourselves would strain self-mockery, and give future readership, till then never nagged, as reward for an understandable curiosity into our origins, an unwelcome grope.