One Thing is Not Another

On the Art of Discernment

In the midst of taking on some new work (interviewing for the New Culture Forum), I have been engaging in a rather interesting Lenten diet—basically the Orthodox restrictions (no meat, no fish, no eggs, no dairy, but also no oil), plus no sugar (beyond that which occurs naturally in fruit, and one teaspoon of honey per day). A vegan diet (bar the honey), basically. The no oil restriction is interesting: one learns to cook with water, vinegar (I have a pan that can cope, fortunately). I began with a 60 hour fast (only salt, black coffee and herbal tea) between Sunday afternoon and broken with the Eucharist on Ash Wednesday (I don’t drink Communion wine, of course). And I’m eating less.

I didn’t cut out coffee, which would have been the real test. But maybe next year. Anyway, all of this is still on-going (I’m not taking Sundays off, because it just seems easier to keep going with it), and of course there are still several weeks of Lent left. Let’s see if I can keep it going.

The most interesting aspect of all this, though, is what it has done to my sense of taste and smell. By restricting my diet I have quite quickly made all the food I can eat seem unutterably delicious: marmite and peanut/almond/walnut butter stand out as particularly tasty, but pretty much everything has become incredibly appealing. Some lemon or lime juice on some steamed spinach is acute, and fresh figs, in particular, are just ridiculous. The diet seems to operate as a kind of reset, basically, and I have more energy and optimism, and am praying and walking and thinking and reading more attentively.

My sense of smell, long battered by various iterations of covid and all the weird neo-illnesses that go round, which seem to be a fusion of several different things, has returned. Not gently, or slowly, but in sharp bursts of powerful scent. Admittedly, living in London, this is frequently less than ideal, as many of the city’s emanations are somewhat malodorous. Nevertheless, there is an interesting moment when you can almost make a bad thing good, at least hypothetical. I need to think about this last phenomenon a bit more, though.

In any case, all of this is to say I have been reflecting on what it means to discern, determine, judge, critique, prioritise, hierarchise and so on. Handily, I have a course coming up in April that addresses all of these issues! Discernment will take place over four weeks, beginning on the evening of Wednesday the 15th April. We will cover Imagination, Taste, Attention, and Literacy and read all kinds of interesting people, from Simone Weil to Hume to Pierre Bourdieu to St. Ignatius of Loyola. I particularly want to think about discernment in the age of the supposed literacy crisis, and in the era of tailored slop. Do sign up if you’re around, and write to Pierre at Verdurin or message me here if you have any questions.

I’ll write more soon: I realise there hasn’t been any poetry for a while. To order! And the imagination!