Variety is the Substance of Life

Variety is not the spice of life, it's the substance. You can keep your body alive by doing the same repetitive job for years, eating the same staples day after day and sheltering in a generically furnished box made of ticky-tacky on the hillside, but you'll be dying inside. Your identity will stagnate and you won't be living, but rather enduring a slow death. I once met an English doctor who had fallen from grace in his profession. I met him on a campsite in the south of France while I was enjoying a very brief and un-illustrious career as a grape picker in a village called Trouillas. He was testing the theory that man cannot live by bread alone. He thought he could and that he was proving it, but was strangely oblivious to the fact that he was drinking a litre and a half of red wine a day and that his ankles were swollen to the size of basketballs. I lasted 5 days in the job and my biblical friend was so starved of company that he stopped talking about himself and started asking about me in an attempt to stop me from leaving. It worked and I got a fast track psychoanalysis out of it. The point is that the bread may have stood between Brion and starvation, but it was the wine and conversation that was making his situation tolerable.