Sunday, February 23, 2014

Have Your Cake and Eat it

You can't have your cake and eat it. That's what we are told, but why? In Japan, people love to take pictures of food. There is a saying in Japan that you taste food first with your eyes. This is what underlies the tremendous care and skill that goes into the presentation of Japanese food. When a cake arrives on the table it gets photographed, then eaten. In a sense this is having your cake and eating it. Obviously the phrase have your cake and eat it is not meant so literally. It usually implies the necessity of making a choice and giving up one thing in preference for another. If you want to go out with your friends tonight, you can't watch whatever on television. If you want a bicycle for your birthday, you can't have a train set. This apparently simple truth is complicated these days by recording technology and parents increasingly yielding to pressure from the consumer society to give children everything they want. It's actually hard to think of an example of some situation where it isn't possible, for some people at least, to have their cake and eat it. My pet peeve in this area is people who want to take something from you, time, money, attention etc in a way that is not really fair, but also want you to aid them in not feeling bad about doing it. Some people are highly skilled at this. And this links into the area of relationships. If you make a commitment, you are making a choice to either have the cake or eat it. You can't gain without sacrificing something. If you take the hedonist and enjoy the all night parties together, you have also to take the bags under the eyes and the tired moodiness in the daytime. If you take the interesting character you have also to take the troubled past that forged it. If you take the beauty, you have also to take the vanity and/or the constant competition. To try to have your cake and eat it in the sphere of romantic relationships means staying constantly on the move, enjoying some attractive feature and getting out before its less obviously attractive corollary becomes apparent. Again some people are very skilled at this, while others marry and have affairs. We are all subject to the temptation to have our cake and eat it, or at least to try. Let he or she who is without sin cast the first stone. My question is this: what do we lose when we have our cake and eat it? My own answer is that we lose our connection to reality: the nuanced pleasure of enjoying and being satisfied by something that is then gone forever except in memory; or the aesthetic delight tinged with frustration of having our visual sense stimulated by something we cannot enjoy the consumption of. These days we talk about reading books and watching films as consumption and advertisers would try to convince you that you can indeed have your cake and eat it. Something important is lost when we view the world that way. Give some thought to what we might mean in this day and age when we say you can't have your cake and eat it and you might just realize that it's as true today as it ever was.

No comments:

Post a Comment