Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
The Educational Value of Hunger
Harper’s Weekly (November 6, 1909) : 27
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If one has suffered hunger and yet has succeeded in pushing it so far back into the past that it ceases to be an embarrassment, it then becomes most unmistakably an asset. The more one thinks of it, the more it grows into the biggest achievement of one’s life, and the exact degree of leanness one sank to during the trying but virtuous period is balanced to a fraction by one’s replete, smug recollection of it in the present. Genuine, obligatory hunger, particularly if one contrived the pinnacle of paying the price of a meal for a book, a night at the play, or some other soul-recreating delight, gives one an upper hand with basely fed mortals that is simply astonishing. At the most unlikely moments the revelation comes of their having had access since the first moment of their carnal existence to from three to five meals a day, and with a bound your stature augments six inches and your soul swaggers. “What do they know,” you say, flicking the snuff of satisfaction from the ruffle of experience — “what do they know of life? Pah! human sympathy is to them a closed book. The deep depths of real reality — after all, only the chosen ones are permitted to sound them. It takes a great heart to have been hungry. Ah, yes, and a great mind.” At this reflection one is fairly beside oneself with windy vanity, and a maudlin eye rolls in Tartuffian sympathy for those who have been denied the fortunately distant boon. They are very nice people, of course; charming creatures, but limited, lamentably crippled on the warmer side, unable to see all the facets of the human problem, and not to be considered when vital matters are under consideration.
After a little gentle rubbing in of the advantages of having known hunger, it has come to be a thing unutterably to be desired, and there has been a noticeable tendency, on the part of the unregenerate, to show that they are as good as any one and have no intention of being bull-dozed for what they were unable to help. They even, in their ardor, put in false claims, but these shallow pretensions are quickly shown up. Half a dozen questions, and one knows the pretender at his real value. Was there ever a time when undisguised corned beef was your one conception of earthly bliss? Did your lips uncontrollably twitch at the thought, and were you obliged to turn away your head from the very suggestion of it, such were its filling qualities? All these are unknown experiences to you? Then there really seems no need for further discussion. But the poor clamoring outsiders will continue. They tell harrowing tales of their train being snowed under, with nothing but a Pullman buffet to sustain them for twelve hours, and insist that they got a very clear idea from that of what real privation must be. Or else they say that in their young and theoretical days, because of some mad belief in the virtue of abstinence, they went without sufficient food for days. But these count them not a jot, though Heaven knows why, as doing a thing because you think it right certainly ought to be greater than doing it because you have to. For some reason this does not at all hold with hunger. To have deliberately gone in for hunger and expect praise is the last word in irritation to one of the chosen. He feels it to be damningly idiotic and inhumanly stoical. It is just this attitude that shows him the gulf between himself and the imitation. To have had food possible and preferred a theory and an empty stomach — there is something there that repels him.
It is the having been in the place where you realized the glorious beauty of food, where the very idea of a thick soup made you poetically delirious, on which he bases his claim to distinction. To take in first of all the complex charm of hunger, the gradual building-up of pangs, the mingling of the thirst and hunger themes, then the crashing climax of satisfied desires followed by the hallowed calm of realizing what has happened to you. With this great drama of life known to you in its most exquisite detail one’s foundation is built and the finer shades follow. One’s claim on recontemplating it was a great one. Hunger, hunger, there is nothing to be compared to it once it is well recovered from. Smacking one’s lips at the solidity of one’s moral position, it is not to be expected that one should refrain from thanking Circumstance for having looked out so consummately for one’s interests .
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The radical changes that a purchase goes through between the moment when, by a terrifying literalness, on the part of a salesman, it is irretrievably made and the time when it is unwrapped and disclosed to your astonished eyes in your own home, are most difficult to account for. If by any chance the thing was bought months ago in a country meanly taking advantage of your new-fledged rhapsodies, and has arrived, after a long period of forgetfulness on your part, during which time you have gone through the initiation of remorseful uprooting of what you used to think beautiful and a humble effort to learn a few of the more elementary indications of what you now perceive to be rightfully worshipped — if all this has happened between the time you gave directions for packing and the moment when you struggle on the floor with two chisels and a box that follows you around like a dog, then surprise great and unadulterated is in store for you.
The conviction that the thing they have sent is not the thing you bought will be so strong and so settled that the arguments to the contrary raised by tiresome friends can be blown aside by the lightest snort. Are you the sort of person to be taken by a trumpery piece of pottery burnt into colors which torture your tongue with a lemony feeling at this very moment, making you grimace with pain? Certainly not. This basin is neither like you nor the thing you bought. Your taste, you grant, is not infallible; still, ye gods! expressage is something! You hope no one thinks you paid and prepaid and did it all over again for a low, vulgar, market-woman of a basin like that. Certainly not.
If your known taste and judgment fail to prove the basin in the wrong, this is not the first time that such a thing has happened to you. It is more or less a well-known trick of tradespeople. Only the other day a garment came home from a shop in this case but three days had intervened, so you could hardly be accused of having forgotten and when you pulled off the tissue wrapping you fairly closed your eyes in a charitable effort to avoid seeing the fearful mistake of the shopman.
Those buttons bought by you? Never until that moment had your eyes been insulted by those buttons. And that curious ruffle bimbling down the side, there is nothing in your character to correspond with that ruffle. The entire garment is foreign to you. It has points in common with the one you chose, but not enough to upset your certainty that a second, and a brute of a second, has been substituted. Determined to get the elegant thing you originally took, strong in the sense of wrong done you, you returned to the shop, dragging the cloak with you. It might be that shopkeepers’ methods were at last to be uncovered, unsuspected secrets turning up to amaze people who failed to possess your accurate memory for detail. With the exaltation of pioneer in a recently discovered dark continent you confronted the salesman, and just here an inexplicable thing occurred. He remained haughty under your accusations, neither flinching nor attempting surreptitiously to change the buttons. And when at the end of your breath you demanded, an awful thought having occurred to you, “On your word of honor, is this or is this not a different cloak from the one I purchased?” the earthling sneered and answered, “Certainly not.”
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