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can be seen in Chardin.
    And there is nothing gastronomically more eye-appealing than the shade of loose stools. The true scandal is that we no longer dare to say or think this. Long live Dauphin-shit!
    Take Americans, who are unable to face death and have built up a whole industry on slogans like, “You do the dying – we handle all the rest!” so as to disguise the reality of the phenomenon, to minimize it, dress it up, pasteurize it, standardize it, and deprive it of its tragedy. But death conceived without grandeur can inspire nothing but a mean life with mediocre thoughts. There is no sub stance to the life of men if death is devoid of meaning. The U.S.A. would find Dauphin-shit unthinkable, so they replace it by sugar candy-pink, i.e., blandness and mediocrity.
    I dream of restoring its solemnity and fascination to death. Perhaps it will be necessary, as in the great days of the Escorial, to go back to the muckheaps on which one could be present at the slow decomposition of bodies, with sight and smell bringing to minds and memories the fermented values of a true spirituality. The worm-ridden bodies accomplished their last noble function: the return to earth. In the acceptance of scatology, of defecation and death, there is a spiritual energy that I exploit with great consistency. I am con vinced that, unconsciously, the deep impulses that moved me to disembowel my little dead and decomposed porcupine also doubt less demanded that I eat it.
     
    Dalí: Kill And Eat
    I love to crack between my teeth the skulls of little birds, bones that I can suck the marrow out of, gamy woodcocks served in their own excrement, and I regret only that I never got to eat the famous turkey cooked live, which, it is said, is a magical dish. I know I am fiercely ravenous, and my conscience is delighted with my cannibalistic appetite, for what I thus consume is the constant proof of my living reality.
    I salivate in a more lively way, knowing myself to be alive, when devouring something dead. The jaw, moreover, is a wonderful instrument for becoming aware of our own lust for life, and the quality of reality, which is in fact only a gigantic reservoir of rot, of which our dining-tables are the cemeteries.
    The truth is between our teeth. All philosophy is proved out in the art of eating. A man reveals himself when he is fork in hand. The aristocracy of Grande Cuisine has always appealed to me. Like my father, I am wild about seafood, those crustaceans whose virgin flesh is protected by the bones they are shrewd enough to grow on the outside, but I detest oysters out of their shells and the mushiness of spinach.
    Joseph de Maistre said it all on this subject when he commented that on a battlefield man never disobeys and the whole earth continuously soaked in blood is an immense altar on which every thing living is endlessly, measurelessly, relentlessly immolated, until the consuming of all things, the extinction of all evil, the very death of death.
    Yes, obliteration is inevitable. We will all be digested by the earth. And I think of that all the time. Not one of my actions, one of my creations but is profiled against this background.
    At no moment in my life am I unaware of the presence of death. It makes me happy, witty. First of all, because everything in its shadow becomes unique and inevitable, and then because I intend to cheat a little by having myself hibernated, i.e., by extending the comedy two or three more acts into the coming century. Finally, because I believe in the resurrection of bodies. It is too bad that I am not a believer. I have not lost hope. St. Augustine showed the way by praying to God to give him faith, but not without first giving him the time necessary to exhaust the pleasures available on earth. I desire eternal afterlife with the persistence of memory. I want to be able to remember every detail of my life. Beatitude means nothing to me without the certainty of remembering the whole of my life. I reject other