Literature Excerpt: The Lemming To The Sea

Currently, I'm reading M.F.K. Fisher (1906-1992). She is a writer that loves to write about food, passion, and love. Her books are absolutely art. For me, it's incredible to read about food in such literary form. One of the more accurate descriptions of her works is written by Cyra McFadden, San Francisco Examiner,  

"Food is what she wrote about, although to leave it at that is reductionist in the extreme. What she really wrote about was passion, the importance of living bodly instead of cautiously; oh, what scorn she had for timid eaters, timid lovers, people who took timid stands, or none at all, on matters of principle."

All this to say, wanted to share an incredible description she provided when discussing dining alone   (The Lemming to the Sea):

More often than not, people who see me on trains and in ships, or in restaurants, feel a kind of resentment of me since I taught myself to enjoy being alone. Women are puzzled, which they hate to be, and jealous of the way I am served, with such agreeable courtesy, and of what I am eating and drinkin, which is almost never the sort of thing they order for themselves.  Men are puzzled too, in a more personal way. I anger them as males.

I am sorry. I do not like to do that, or puzzle the women either. But if I must be alone, I refuse to be alone as if it were something weak and distasteful, like convalescence. Men see me eating in public, and I look as if I "knew my way around"; and yet I make it plain that I know my way around without them, and that upsets them. I know what I want and I usually get it because I am adaptable to locales. I order meals that are more typically masculine than feminine, if feminine means whipped cream and cherries. I like good wines, or good drinkin'-likka, and beers and ales. I like waiters...And all of these reasons, and probably thousands others, like the way I wear my hair and what shade my lipstick is, make people look strangely at me, resentfully, with a kind of hurt bafflement, when I dine alone.

 This is a woman before her time - I still know people that cannot spend an evening alone, even when they want to.