Pomodori

~ Live & Learn

To travel is to eat. We were tucking into our lunch, which is to say Laura was munching crackers and I was eating bread and pomodori. These tomatoes tasted nothing like English tomatoes. They tasted tomatoey. I ate them one after another, the taste like a memory of childhood which actually turned out not to be a taste but a smell of taste, the reddening green smell – I had it exactly – of my Uncle Harry’s greenhouse in Shurdington where the air ripened under glass.

—  Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Notes:

  • Photo Source
  • Inspired by: I picked up the book after reading “Vivian Gornick: ‘I Couldn’t Finish Michelle Obama’s Becoming‘: (The Guardian, March 26, 2021): “The last book that made me laugh Out of Sheer Rage by Geoff Dyer is a brilliant book. For me, the best thing he ever wrote. A little bit of genius, it made me laugh, and laugh, and laugh.”

27 thoughts on “Pomodori”

  2. Ahhh, yes, I hear you, Geoff. I have just been transported back to my grandparents’ garden…. I am sitting cross-legged between two rows of tomato plants, plucking perfectly ripened orbs straight from the vine. The skin is warm, the surface taut—stretched tight from the juicy flesh just below the surface—the taste a gorgeous blend of sunshine, earth and water. My childhood crystallized in this memory….

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  3. I picked up a plastic box of Campari tomatoes about 14 hours ago and tucked into two as soon as I got home! Each is perfect, the size of a golf ball. Thank God we do business with Mexico! It’s funny how the littlest things can be ripe with the past, and may also say, “Even now, you’re still you.”

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    2. And your comment reminds me of:

      “How old are you?” “Fifty.” This is a dialogue that has kept being repeated today. The number of years I had lived represented important information for the doctors. I had the feeling that, in this way, for the first time—in this long life—my time was being accurately measured. This meant that today all my illusions of youth vanished. We rationalize our experience of time, but beyond the givens of the calendar, we are not conscious of it. Because “in spirit” we stay the same. “In spirit” I was the same person I had been in my twenties. That’s how it is, probably, with everyone, it’s a characteristic of our species. That’s how we protect ourselves from death. Western cultures see man in his asymmetry and disharmony, so they separate him into a body that ages and a soul that doesn’t age. Apart, presumably, from Dostoevsky.

      — Semezdin Mehmedinovic, My Heart: A Novel. Celia Hawkesworth (Translator). (Catapult, March 9, 2021)

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  6. I was about to say what Karen said. In Italy, I marvelled at the flavour bursting from their tomatoes.
    I have promised myself a garden this year because nothing tastes the same when it’s plucked off the vine or plant or pulled out of the ground, dirt brushed off…

    So? Is the book worth it, after all?

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      1. Neither have I. I have only visited one teeny-tiny region. Thirsting for more. Much more.
        And what? Only 15 pages since the last mention? 😉 I am teasing, of course and await your two cents’ when you are ready.

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          6. In the old days, there was nothing else. Now FB, Instagram, all papers online, Twitter. You remember, right? Before you were banned from all of them for posting inappropriate material.

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          10. Ha, Yes, each day We Women will catch the snail pace of your page(s) advancement – me yesterday, Dale today & who will it be tomorrow? & how few pages will it be?

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