Mr. Palomar ponders cheese

A delicious selection from "The Cheese Museum," a chapter in the excellent Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino.

The cheese shop appears to Mr. Palomar the way an encyclopedia looks to an autodidact: he could memorize all the names, venture a classification according to the form — bar of soap, cylinder, dome, ball — according to the consistency — dry, buttery, cramy, vined, firm — according to the alien materials involved in the crust or in the heart — raisins, pepper, waluts, sesame seeds, herbs, molds — but this would not bring him a step closer to true knowledge, which lies in the experience of the flavors, composed of memeory and imagination at once. Only on the basis of this could he establish the scale of preferences and tastes and curiosities and exclusions.

Behind every cheese there is a pasture of a different green under a different sky: meadows caked with salt that the tides of Normandy deposit every evening; meadows scented with aromas in the windy sunlight of Provence; there are different flocks, with their stablings and their transhumances; there are secret processes handed down over the centuries. This shop is a museum: Mr. Palomar, visiting it, feels as he does in the Louvre, behind every displayed object the presence of the civilization that has given it form and takes form from it.

Now that's food writing. Damn.