By Jackson Posey | Staff Writer
There’s nothing quite like the sweet aroma of perfectly-aged cheese.
It’s a vital piece of a beautiful symphony. The dazzling hues of the morning sunrise, the taste of freshly cut lemons and honey, the inexplicable salve of a cool breeze or the soft crash of waves in the morning. Life, with all of its twists and turns, is positively magical.
Contemporary society finds its “grounding” in a full-throated denial of transcendence. In a twisted echo of art history, philosophical romanticism has given way to a sort of emotional neo-minimalism, one which dulls the liminal tones and brings into focus nothing more than the small, rectangular metal of an iPhone. Our lives — and our perception of splendor — have been beaten to a pulp.
In other words, we need to stop and smell the cheese.
“Cheese has another quality, which is also the very soul of song,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in his succinctly-named 1936 essay, “Cheese.” “The substance itself is imaginative. It is ancient — sometimes in the individual case, always in the type and custom. It is simple, being directly derived from milk, which is one of the ancestral drinks … You know, I hope (though I myself have only just thought of it), that the four rivers of Eden were milk, water, wine and ale. Aerated waters only appeared after the Fall.”
Chesterton’s England, rocked by the Great Depression and unknowingly nestled between two World Wars, nevertheless produced a man so enchanted by cheese of all things that he could ascribe to it “every quality which we require in exalted poetry.” But Chesterton’s hope for a poetic life didn’t rest in cheese itself. Rather, he saw cheese as an exalted vessel: one of a million portals to the enchanted life, portals accessible to anyone with clear eyes and a pure heart.
Life’s “pulp-ification” has taken a number of forms. Most striking on college campuses are the scores of students walking outside with bowed heads and covered ears, too enthralled by a 6.3-inch OLED display’s representation of the world to recognize the beauty around them. And yet, the Luddite’s cry of “It’s the darn cell phones” fails to recognize the breadth of the problem.
Just six in 10 Americans born since 1980 participated in “at least one outdoor activity” in 2023. The number of daily walkers in the US dropped by 36% between 2019 and 2022. The nation just hit its all-time low ranking in the World Happiness Report, falling one spot below the United Arab Emirates even as it maintained its stranglehold on the global economy. Anecdotally, people seem less fascinated by the world around them than ever before.
In one sense, our language has failed us. Beautiful writing and eloquent speech affect the heart in ways little else can. The interplay between orator and audience can at times become beautiful, like a dance between a master choreographer and a chorus of energetic participants. But digital communication, like the physical technology that makes it possible, has created a stark distinction between speaker and receiver.
Language can allure the heart and feed the brain. Great writing summons imagery grander and more powerful than any blockbuster film could ever hope to imitate. Humans have been imbued with imagination, a thirst for something transcendent. From spiderweb cracks in the sidewalk to a beehive-shaped cloud, the wonder of creation is near to all who seek it.
But we don’t.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge once wrote of the “film of familiarity and selfish solicitude” laid over our eyes when we look at the world. Rather than recognizing “the charm of novelty” in everyday life, we veil ourselves to what lies beyond. “We have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not and hearts that neither feel nor understand.”
We veil our eyes to avoid loss. We haven’t merely become cynical — the reality is much, much worse. We’re too scared of disappointing ourselves to choose cynicism. Commitment itself is nothing more than a future letdown.
“We have dulled our own vision of the world, both by over-familiarity and by what Coleridge calls “selfish solicitude,” that is to say, we are treating nature not only as a familiar and easily dismissible background but also as an agglomeration of stuff for us to exploit,” poet Malcolm Guite wrote in his book, “Lifting the Veil.”
“To make that exploitation easier, to avoid being challenged by the radiant beauty and otherness of nature, we throw over it this ‘film of familiarity and selfish solicitude.’ Then … we forget that the veil, the film of familiarity is there at all and think that nature is just as dull as we are,” Guite said.
With a mental health crisis mounting and the only apparent remedy a constant stream of therapeutic self-help advice, it’s no wonder we’ve chosen to look inwards for answers. And yet, before we have time to realize it, the emotional fabric we bury ourselves in begins to choke away the very light we were searching for. The same veil we raised to protect us now blinds us from the beauty we once sought.
All of life holds the enchanting possibility of looking beyond or of recognizing the transcendent nature of the world around us. Trees hold secrets only the truly curious among us will ever know. The endless journey of a funny-looking bug can join the plot line of the Homeric epics. A closet door left ajar? In the most “Sherlock Holmesian” voice I can muster, this must be a clue.
We live in an indescribable world, surrounded by captivating stories of fascinating people. We awake to indescribable beauty and sleep beneath a blanket of twinkling stars. Life itself should be enough to awake our souls to the awe and wonder such a glorious creation deserves. And yet, far too often, we live beneath a veil of our own creation – awake to ourselves, asleep to the world around us. Living totally predictable, utterly unimaginative lives.
Let the veil fall from your eyes. Like scales from the blind man, it will fall away if you’d only be willing to look beyond the cloak. Let the splendor of the world evoke hope for a brighter tomorrow. There’s life in the cracked teapot, in the wandering ladybug, in the man searching the snack aisles at 7-Eleven. There’s a story there, if only we could imagine it.
Perhaps, as Chesterton mused, the moon really is made out of cheese — its waxing and waning is merely the result of some cosmic cheese-eater returning to his midnight snack. Maybe it’s a ball of fire, or a bat signal gone awry.
Life as we know it is just a shadow of a much grander reality. In our quest to understand it, we have failed at our most basic assignment: standing in awe of that which we do not understand. Perhaps a round of Parmigiano Reggiano is just that: a wheel of cheese. But what if cheese itself is a great deal more?
