A CONNECTION WITH CHOCOLATE

When I was nine or ten years old I drew the entire human urinary system for some of my classmates, minus the final foot or so of the urethra. Which disturbed them, and their parents even more. I was gently told a day or two later by the headmaster to please not do that again. Because it upset the public order. Simple peasants and all that. Thereafter I would occasionally describe for them what dying of the plague or various diseases was like, and point out while doing so that they were so lucky to live in the modern era when the ships barber would not dose them or attempt to cure their symptoms with hot irons or leeches.

A boy with good reading skils and access to the Merck Manual plus a scientific encyclopedia is, manifestly, a joy to be around. It makes you entirely overlook the fact that his social and conversational skills may be somewhat lacking. If you are grammar school age.

It is no wonder that I bought my first pipe when I was thirteen.
A thoughtful young man or woman naturally needs a pipe.

Especially when said pipe winks at him or her from the shopwindow of the tobacconist next to the bookstore where he spends several hours a week reading in the stacks. Historical comics, mostly, set in the middle ages. But also Suske & Wiske (Belgian zaniness) and Asterix and Obelix. The latter set in the Roman period.

One of the scenes that kept spoofily cropping up in many of those comics series was a famous painting (The Raft Of The Medusa/ Le Radeau de la Méduse) by the French painter Théodore Géricault. Anytime, in fact, that a shipwreck was part of the story in the comic, even if only a minor detail. It was an image with which I was already familiar since I was eight or so, when I was starting to explore reading material in English, having utterly exhausted the selection of Dutch books in our house and my school reading material in that language being small in comparison.

The painting that illustrates this essay does not relate to that at all. It shows coastal flooding in a tropical country. The aftermath of a storm. Imagine the shipwreck far in the distance, several dozen miles offshore, and too small to be seen.
Desperate men below the horizon.

I don't think I would have liked Géricault if I met him. Too much an obsessed and neurotic oddball. Plus he was confrontational and peculiar. But I like his painting. The Raft Of The Medusa would have made a great illustration for a chocolate bon bon box cover.

Very many paintings would make stellar bon bon box covers.
The majority of the illustrated western canon, in fact.

Much of Rembrandt and Caravaggio looks like chocolate.
In the case of the latter, filled with fruit purée.

I am extremely fond of chocolate.



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