By Simone Bandini
“Men live in cities, they eat without hunger and drink without thirst, they tire without making effort, they chase their time without ever reaching it.
They are being imprisoned, a boundless prison from which it is almost impossible to escape.
Some human beings need to resume their lives, to find a new high road.
Not everyone tries, and few succeed.
One of the main roads is the one that leads to the mountain. There is so much beauty, fatigue, solitude and silence in this climbing world.
These are all unfashionable values that help us to live and get to know ourselves.”
(Walter Bonatti, 1930-2011)
Alas, it is not a question of hunger for culture, the desire to know and cultivate one’s soul, but rather a mimicking of a primary need.
God, nature, fate, have provided us with the sense of taste so that we can maintain our bodies and brain functions. Eating is certainly a fundamental pleasure but remember, it is good that food is ‘deserved’ every day, if only out of a sense of universal justice that ‘giving allows us to receive’ – and every effort brings a reward. This principle takes our lives to a higher plane, where it is our will, where it is the spirit that governs our actions – and it promotes a community cooperation, today one could say empathetic, with one’s family and clan context (what a retrograde term!).
To explain it to the most materialistic – cultural hunger is a pestilence of the modern world that transcends cultures and social conditions – a concept that is immediately visible in the mechanism of profit and money. Making money can make you buy things, services, and people. It is not necessary today to bother with the four Aristotelian causes.
With the same money you can buy rooftop dinners with sensational views, signature dishes at the discretion of the holy men of molecular cuisine, absolute vacuum cooking, metaphysical creams and ganaches, meats massaged on beds of ultra-biological rocket, wild salmon caught on rod only on Scottish nights under full moon, fried kataifi lighter than Polynesian zephyrs.
This is the cultural hunger that now plagues most sentient beings who – after a day spent in offices furnished according to the Taoist geomantic art of feng shui, endless tie calls, sales meetings, sadly cultivate the great samsara of materialism without even realizing it, unaware cogs of a superior machine of which they do not even question – nor do they want to know where it can lead.
A hunger that is not real, or rather of low intensity, since it proceeds from bland and inactive days. From procedures that are always the same, sadness, depression, mediocrity, lack of prospects. The invitation is to get a real hunger, to try to find the high road. Get back to the nitty-gritty, don’t be fooled. Look up. Look for more intense and elevated appetites.
Recommended listening: “I looked at you”, The Doors