Consumed

I’m reading selected essays of Carlos Fuentes. I recommend them to you. He, like his friend Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), is a master of poetic insight. His language is at the same time rational and magical. His sentences seduce.

What is it about English written by or rendered from foreign writers that’s so mystical? Foreign writers sing a song; their cadences enchant; their incantations bewitch me. I cannot discover the secret of their spells; I cannot learn the whispered words, which remain occult, a hidden knowledge.

Anyway, my heart quickened at Fuentes’s observation that words and ideas are like bread and love; they are meant to be shared. I think that they are also alike in that they are meant to be consumed. Just lapping up his words makes me realize what these three favorite things in my world (talking, eating, and making love) have in common: the mouth.