I look down at the plate-I have never seen any confections in these shapes before, and I can’t anticipate the flavour of any of them. There is one in quadrants like a pastry kite, another like a ridged sausage, another like a piece of fried lace. I might as well be living on the moon. It seems I will need a new body in order to live here, that the demands of a new country begin as demands on the body. I feel the weight and alienness of the food, the light, this world where a day has different geography, and a life moves through time and space differently. I feel the tug of Greek words as a change in the force of gravity, and as the plate of pastries in my hand posits a different conception of pleasure. I begin to understand that this language will perceive my body, and the world itself, differently than my own. This is the moment when travel is felt most absolutely, when time, space and history and emotion exert a force on the body, and the distances you are travelling inside are as great as the distance you have travelled outside.
Patricia Storace, “dinner with Persephone: Travels in Greece”, 1996
Photo: R. Kennedy Stephen
