Palinurus on obesity

A month or more ago, when D and I were visiting on our Ninth date, I picked up a lovely book in a second-hand bookstore. The author is Cyril Connolly, writing under the name "Palinurus" and the book is called The Unquiet Grave. It is a commonplace book, of sorts: or at any rate, while most of the scattered thoughts are Connolly's, they are nonetheless interleaved with quotes from a variety of other authors. (In some ways, actually, it resembles a blog! This is a theme that could be teased out into a full post on its own, I think.) But I thought it remarkable that, while D and I have been discussing issues of eating and drinking (and over-eating and over-drinking) -- most recently when we started discussing this night here -- I sat down one night to read a couple of pages of Palinurus before falling asleep and ran across this following:

New-year resolution: lose a stone [14 lbs.], then all the rest will follow. Obesity is a mental state, a disease brought on by boredom and disappointment; greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear. The one way to get thin is to re-establish a purpose in life.

Thus a good writer must be in training: if he is a stone too heavy then that fourteen pounds represents for him so much extra indulgence, so much clogging laziness; in fact a coarsening of sensibility. There are but two ways to be a good writer: like Homer, Shakespeare or Goethe, to accept life completely,or like Pascal, Proust, Leopardi, Baudelaire, to refuse ever to lose sight of its horror.