Cheese
Cheese is a thing of sublime European importance, if only because of its antiquity. I do not intend any idiotic joke in speaking of the antiquity of cheese. Cheese and wine are the two things of which we can read in the remote pastoral poems of the Romans. And in connection with such really ancient matters there is a curious thing to be noticed. The older things are the more they are really fresh and free and varied, the more they differ really from town to town and from valley to valley. The new things are entirely the same wherever they go.
Bears’ soap in the Hebrides is the same as Bears’ soap in London. There is not some dark and delicate variety of Bears’ soap suited to the stormy islets in the ultimate sea. The men who use Bears’ soap do not find it smell faintly different; the children who eat Bears’ soap do not find it taste with an exquisite difference merely because it is experienced in that fringe of indeterminate and rainy island where, as Mr. W. B. Yeats would say — “Time and the world and all things dwindle out.”
The people in the Hebrides either know Bears’ soap or they do not: their enemies say not. But if they know Bears’ soap at all, it is Bears’, not theirs. It is the same exact and excellent article that is sold in a shop in Regent Street. But it would not be thus if the soap were cheese. If the people of the Hebrides had a cheese it would be an awful, shadowy, Hebridean cheese. It would taste of the terrible headlands and the hopeless sea.
It is so, I say, with all the old things, and with cheese especially. Cheese changes from county to county. Cheese can even change, like wine, from valley to valley. It is exactly because it is very old that it is always various and surprising; and it is exactly because humanity (with one dreadful voice) demands cheese, that cheese is always different…. It is precisely the things that have been most continuous that are able to be most diverse. The more old a thing is the more full of life it is. — G. K. Chesterton, “On Local Cheeses,” Collected Works 27: The Illustrated London News, 1905-1907 266-267 (I’ve divided this into paragraphs for easier reading).
July 9th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
So does it stand to reason that as we age, we become more full of life?! 🙂 P.S. I love cheese!
July 9th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
[…] exactly because it is very old that it is always various and surprising; and it is exactly because humanity (with one dreadful voice) demands cheese, that cheese is always […]