Humility through Sex and Food
I was puzzled by a line I'd read recently which recalled Malcolm Muggeridge joking to the writer Graham Greene, "I am a sinner trying to become a saint and you are a saint trying to be a sinner". Greene talks of his "unhappy affairs", which strikes me as almost oxymoronic since affairs imply a short-termness that would be ended in the event of unhappiness. I guess his were semi-committed affairs.
His perspective on food and sex is more head-scratching, a way of looking them that I'd never considered:
The helplessness or complicity of our humanity in its involuntary needs, cravings, and decay aroused a resentment conspicuous above all in many of Graham's responses to women. For much of his life he had wrestled, in love and in his books, with the paradox of desire and consummation, illusion and disgust, ectasy and blame. It was not difficult to imagine him holding the view ascribed by Plutarch to Alexander the Great - another abstemious eater - that 'sleep and the act of generation chiefly made him sensible that he was merely mortal.'
-- Shirley Hazzard, Greene on Capri
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