Wednesday 2 April 2008

Herrings and onions

‘How like Herrings and onions our vices are the morning after we have committed them/ & even lawful pleasures like the smell of a dinner-room when you have gone out & re-entered it, after dinner’ wrote Coleridge in his Notebooks [p.71]. And how ironic that he chooses, to symbolise vice, two of the healthiest imaginable foods!

How might we update? ‘‘How like cigarettes our vices are the morning after we have committed them…’ for even smokers dislike the fug of old tobacco in carpets and curtains; except that cigarettes are not a metaphor for vice, but actually a vice.

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