The Vegetarian Menu

Is it too late?

Yes.

Johan reproaches Marianne for saying aloud that which is meant to be left unspoken. Like those final few moments in Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, as the divorcees face the impossibility of ever coming together and the impossibility of being alone, I have reached a similar impasse with the occupants of this particular restaurant. I look around at the other tables and apprehend at once the allure and repugnance of other people’s lives, lives that are all already regrettably underway. I am sympathetic to Marianne, I think. In Johan’s shrunken state, in all of his sudden gentleness, he seems too self-righteous to me, all the more so because he speaks prudently. This is the same man that, earlier that night, in a fit of lamentation and jealousy, asks Marianne to reign in her “awful levelheadedness.” When to speak and when to let thoughts lie dormant? It’s not always so simple, Johan.

The waiter sees that I am alone. He hastens to take my order, to bring my food, to retrieve my bill. Is it unusual to have lunch alone in this part of the country? I move to the street and contemplate the efficacy of billboards, those damn inescapable billboards. Here in Texas, they outnumber the things of which they are advertisements. In Vermont, billboards are banned along highways. Consequently, the other side of the state border is crowded with ads for ski resorts. To legislate aesthetics seems a curious affair. If this world is characterized by a nihilistic mass culture, where aesthetic value has no solid ground into which to dig its heels aside from the reactionary desires reflected in billboards, window displays, and the constant din of television, then such legislation seems to be a more dignified social contract, a preservation against vulgarity. But to legislate against culture itself is a form of tyranny, and moreover, it’s sort of tactless. Again, there's such confusion in the idea that we should only be given these two pointless options: to speak up resentfully or to maintain self-righteous quietism.

So I guess it is no longer possible to have a discreet lunch by myself. And I need new shoes, I observe. Buying shoes, also, is an act to be done discreetly, in the secrecy of the night even. As with things that make us feel the shame of being bodily and grotesque, making purchases can act as an admission, not only of being a desiring body, but of being a body that has no control over its desires. Buying shoes is something that I am uncomfortable admitting that I do, something that I can only think and never say aloud. Not because I am averse to fashion, but precisely because I am suspicious of a fashion that can be talked about in broad day light. I pretend there is a standoff, a kind of marital feud, that would prevent either party from breaking the silence for fear of weakness. From time to time a silly thought occurs to me: to walk around wearing tissue boxes on my feet. But all of the world’s weaknesses must remain in the realm of thought, and the only suggestion on the surface of things that reminds me otherwise is in the occasional lapse where we forget why we had begun this feud in the first place. From where I am seated now in the town square I can watch people browse the surface of a public bulletin board.