I Live With Carpe Diem Engraved On

I Sat In The Gradually Chilling Room, Thinking Of My Whole Past The Way A Drowning Man Is Supposed To, And It Seemed Part Of The Present, Part Of The Gray Cold And The Beggar Woman Without A Face And The Moulting Birds Frozen To Their Own Filth In The Orangerie. I Know Now I Was In The Throes Of Some Small Glandular Crisis, A Sublimated Bilious Attack, A Flick From The Whip Of Melancholia, But Then It Was Terrifying...nameless...

Since We Must Eat To Live, We Might As Well Do It With Both Grace And Gusto.

If Time, So Fleeting, Must Like Humans Die, Let It Be Filled With Good Food And Good Talk, And Then Embalmed In The Perfumes Of Conviviality.

At Its Best, [japanese Cooking] Is Inextricably Meshed With Aesthetics, With Religion, With Tradition And History. It Is Evocative Of Seasonal Changes, Or Of One's Childhood, Or Of A Storm At Sea.

There Is A Mistaken Idea, Ancient But Still With Us, That An Overdose Of Anything From Fornication To Hot Chocolate Will Teach Restraint By The Very Results Of Its Abuse.