Page:Tolstoy - Essays and Letters.djvu/98

82 one can yet eat some fish if it is well flavoured with sauces and swallowed down with white wine. It would seem as if one could get through nothing more, either rich or tasty, but a sweet dish can still be managed: in summer ices, in winter stewed fruits, preserves, etc. And thus we have a dinner, a modest dinner. The pleasure of such a dinner can be greatly augmented. And it is augmented, and there is no limit to this augmentation: stimulating snacks, hors-d'œuvres before dinner, and entremets and desserts, and various combinations of tasty things, and flowers and decorations and music during dinner.

And, strange to say, men who daily overeat themselves at such dinners—in comparison with which the feast of Belshazzar, that evoked the prophetic warning, was nothing—are naïvely persuaded that they may yet be leading a moral life.

Fasting is an indispensable condition of a good life; but in fasting, as in self-control in general, the question arises, with what shall we begin?—How to fast, how often to eat, what to eat, what to avoid eating? And as we can do no work seriously without regarding the necessary order of sequence, so also we cannot fast without knowing where to begin—with what to commence self-control in food.

Fasting! And even an analysis of how to fast, and where to begin! The notion seems ridiculous and wild to the majority of men.

I remember how, with pride at his originality, an Evangelical preacher, who was attacking monastic asceticism, once said to me, 'Ours is not a Christianity of fasting and privations, but of beefsteaks.' Christianity, or virtue in general—and beefsteaks!

During a long period of darkness and lack of all guidance. Pagan or Christian, so many wild, immoral ideas have made their way into our life (especially into that lower region of the first steps toward a good life—our relation to food, to which no one paid any atten-