The Glutton for Life

THE GLUTTON FOR LIFE

Once a glutton for life dreamed of swallowing it all.
Hungry for everything that life had on offer, the glutton was loath to have any leftovers remain after the feast. If you weren’t prepared to swallow all of life, it murmured to itself in the dream, what was the point of being alive? In the few years you’re given to lick your chops at will, how much of what you craved could you take in?
And yet how much you must strive to take in, gulping down life without missing a taste of the smallest portion! The sweet with the sour, the succulent with the dry as dust, the flaming hot with the icy cold—every enticement to the senses or to fancy—nothing should escape the glutton’s voracious appetite. Allowing such a thing to happen would amount to denying a part of oneself. And if the least of life was ignored or rejected, if any of it failed to be downed in full, then life was incomplete in some measure. And who would be such a fool as to claim life ever fell short of its own fullness?
From the microscopic to the immense, then, nothing was absent from the glutton’s dream. The only worry was waking before all that existence had to serve up was savored. If such a thing happened, what excuse would close the gaping regret? To have the chance of stuffing oneself as full of life as possible, to best Gargantua and yet miss out on a single morsel, what a failing towards oneself and towards life.
From the depths of this worry gradually arose a new one. At first it was no more than a suggestion of self-doubt, the type of shapeless unease that calls attention to itself only by its swirl of shadow within shadow. But eventually the darkness gave way and in its place rose a challenge that seized hold of the glutton’s dream and threatened to reduce it to an idle whim.
How naïve the glutton had been! How could even sweat-drenched gorging not fail to prove inadequate? For in order to “swallow it all,” would swallowing all of life be enough? No, the glutton now realized. To swallow all of life required swallowing as well all of its equal: death. It was that simple. Death and life, life and death, neither one without the other. Abashed at not having recognized this demand from the start, the glutton had to admit it couldn’t have been otherwise.
All or nothing? Trust yourself to the summoning fullness of the dream or suffer the consequences of its fading away as you awoke to the regret of failing to prove worthy of your own appetites? The time to act was now or never. To stretch your jaws wide as wide could be and bolt down absolutely everything, until the veins that stood out on your brow threatened to burst.
“Well then,” the glutton dreamed on with a mouth opening to the full, “here goes!”