In the good old days of the late Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorship, he was known as la vache qui rit, the cow that laughs, because of his uncanny resemblance to the trademark animal of the French cheese brand of that name. (The best political jokes always emerge from dictatorships—they are the thing that one misses most about the Soviet Union.)
Now it so happens that I bought some Vache qui rit recently, for someone who needed a soft diet. I quite like it myself. The processed gruyère comes in sections of a circle, each one of which represents 45 degrees of that circle. Each section is wrapped in thin aluminium foil, with a triangular paper label.
What is truly admirable about the wrapping is the little red tab of each portion, which, if pulled gently, enables you to easily remove the cheese without loss. Those familiar with this, of course, take it for granted, for it has always been thus. It is no more to be remarked on than the fact that the sun will rise tomorrow.
This taken-for-grantedness is both inevitable and terrible. We cannot stop all the time to reflect or ponder on the fact that the wrapping of a section of processed cheese is the product of human ingenuity and not a free gift of nature. And yet the little red tab is remarkable: Someone, or some people, must have thought of it, and having thought of it, perfected it by means of patient experimentation. Moreover, their invention had then to be put into mass production, another triumph of human ingenuity.
While on the subject of such cheese, I cannot forbear from mentioning the late Monsieur Boursin, a fromager who spent many years perfecting the formula of his soft cheese with garlic and herbs, and thereby became a great benefactor of humanity, as well as being able later to sell his business for nearly $500 million. The famous advertisement, itself ingenious—du pain, du vin et du Boursin, bread, wine and Boursin—helped to sell it.
One cannot spend one’s life in a state of abject or grovelling gratitude, or one will soon sound like Uriah Heep. On the other hand, never to be grateful, always to take everything for granted, is not attractive either, though it is far the more widespread defect of character. Those who take everything for granted are, paradoxically, the first to complain when something inconveniences them or is not to their liking.
When I was a young child and did not want to finish what was on my plate, I would be told to be grateful for it and think of the hungry children in Africa and elsewhere, who had nothing on their plates (or even plates to put their nothing on). I was, I am afraid, a nasty little child who was inclined to answer back, proud of my own cleverness. I said that I did not see how my eating more than I wanted would help the hungry children in Africa, a reply to whose logic I held for a long time.
It took me many years to realize that the point of the injunction to consider the hungry children of Africa was not to help them in any practical way, but to cause me not to take the food on my plate for granted. It was there because of my parents’ work, and, since they were not peasants who labored on the land for a mere subsistence, their work that provided the food on the table implied a vast social network that made exchange and abundance possible.
As a person of no religious belief whatever, I used to be irritated by grace before meals. Why thank a nonexistent entity for what, by definition, it did nothing to produce? But it was in Haiti that I came first to see such grace before a meal as principally psychological in effect.
I was staying with an American missionary doctor overnight (about whom I must write one day). I shared his family’s evening meal, before which they solemnly looked down at the table as the missionary pronounced grace, and then said “Amen.” Normally, I would have scoffed at this piety, partly on philosophical and partly on aesthetic grounds. (I find evangelical Christianity lacking in aesthetic appeal.)
But having enough to eat is by no means to be taken for granted in Haiti. I shall not easily forget another visit to Haiti when my wife and I sat on the terrace of a tiny restaurant in Cap Haitien, which was protected by a wire grille, eating a plate of chicken stew whose chicken also had not been able to take for granted having enough to eat: it was thin and tough, the product of a lifetime of pecking, not altogether successfully, in the dust.
Thin and hungry children watched us from outside, and one or two of them tried to insinuate their small, thin arms through the grille to grab what was on our plate. They were shooed away like flies by the angry patronne of the restaurant. No, in Haiti one did not take for granted having enough to eat, even when one had the means to obtain it: and this, I should add, was in years that, from the standpoint of the present state of the country, were almost like a golden age.
The call to count one’s blessings is salutary but never fully successful. That is why it has to be made regularly, if mental equilibrium is ever to be reached. Perhaps grace before meals is one way of doing this. The fact is, however, “that there was never yet philosopher that could endure the toothache patiently.” I resolve a hundred times never to lose my temper, especially over trifles, but the next time the train is delayed I feel my gorge rising just as if I had never made that resolution.
Lessons are never finally learned: They have to be repeated for creatures as weak in the head as Man. Who would have thought that socialism would have enjoyed a revival after the downfall of the Soviet Union, in the United States of all places? And in part, it is because of a lack of gratitude, a kind of existential stance of taking for granted.
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