Hungry, I sit down for dinner. The first bite is the best. But less and less so the second and third. My animal instinct pushes me forward to fill my stomach and soon I’m not tasting at all, only transferring nutrients. Until I wash my palette with wine between bites. The diversity of tastes makes each seem new.
Hiking, I step up to the first vantage. My eyes drink in the river and my smallness feels the mountains. This, I thought, is the first bite. None after this will be so good. And as I thought they might, less and less were the second and third. Until Peterman offered me some of his wine: “Sometimes, when I’m in a wondrous place, I close my eyes, take deep breaths, and imagine a common place. When I open my eyes, the place is wondrous again.” So I did, imagined Kansas plains. Then drank the river and felt the mountains new. And I wonder, are there limits to what this forest can give, other than the capacities of my receipt?
“Feeling lurks in that interval of time between desire and its consummation,” writes Huxley in Brave New World.
But what about after the first and before the second consummation? Does some desire, and therefore feeling, remain left over for the second? Or is it fully consummated with the first and new for the second?
“‘Think of water under pressure in a pipe … I pierce it once,’ said the Controller. ‘What a jet!’ He pierced it twenty times. There were twenty piddling little fountains.”
I wonder if we might pierce the pipe many times over but retain equal pressure in each additional jet. Or is it more than human to feel so much?