Just Two Strokes

A Regimen

In one scene of Shakespeare's immortal play "Julius Caesar," Caesar turns to those seated around him and says: "I would have about me in my train none but fat men. These lean ones frighten me, for they think."

So leanness can be a strength — and a strength that frightens — since it is the fruit of thinking, and thinking is not always a welcome trait.

The fat, in Shakespeare's logic, are people whose minds are in their paunches. And if we chose to follow this logic, we should come out with a regimen of the utmost simplicity.

A regimen that denies the fat neither sugar nor starch nor butter, and never cuts their ties to the kitchen. Let them eat what they will, and have no further business with massage treatments. One thing only they must do: think. For thinking is leanness, and leanness is the spirit of the age. Otherwise the fat will be put out when people notice that they exist where they ought not to be — the yardstick, as we have said, being Shakespeare's logic.

And we discovered only recently — some four centuries after Shakespeare's play — that we are a nation that must practice thinking, and must no longer prefer that others do its thinking for it.

A News Item... and a Wish

The American magazine Time published a report that a person named Kaufman, living in one of the towns of the Hawaiian Islands, looked one morning at his two children and was alarmed by the intense redness of their cheeks — so alarmed that he asked his wife whether she had put rouge on them.

But it turned out afterwards that the redness was not confined to Kaufman's two children; it appeared that this deep flush, which announces an unnatural glow of health, had come over dozens of children. On studying the matter, the redness proved to be a symptom of illness: it is the result of a mild fever, one of whose signs is that intense flush. The fever has a ponderous scientific name; its everyday name is the blush of shame.

I read the item and longed for the fever to visit us. I longed for it not out of love of doing harm — nor out of an excess of curiosity to become acquainted with it —

Neither the one nor the other —

But out of a desire to see the flush — the blush of shame — visit faces other than the faces of children. To see them redden with shame... if only once in a lifetime.