at once. Compared with that the sunflower,
which can only be seen, is a mere pattern, a thing painted on a flat
wall. Now, it is this sense of the solidity of things that can only be
uttered by the metaphor of eating. To express the cubic content of a
turnip, you must be all round it at once. The only way to get all round
a turnip at once is to eat the turnip. I think any poetic mind that has
loved solidity, the thickness of trees, the squareness of stones, the
firmness of clay, must have sometimes wished that they were things
to eat. If only brown peat tasted as good as it looks; if only white
firwood were digestible! We talk rightly of giving stones for bread: but
there are in the Geological Museum certain rich crimson marbles,
certain split stones of blue and green, that make me wish my teeth were
stronger.

Somebody staring into the sky with the same ethereal appetite declared
that the moon was made of green cheese. I never could conscientiously
accept the full doctrine. I am Modernist in this matter. That the moon
is made of cheese I have believed from childhood; and in the course of
every month a giant (of my acquaintance) bites a big round piece out of
it. This seems to me a doctrine that is above reason, but not contrary
to it. But that the cheese is green seems to be in some degree actually
contradicted by the senses and the reason; first because if the moon
were made of green cheese it would be inhabited; and second because if
it were made of green cheese it would be green. A blue moon is said to
be an unusual sight; but I cannot think that a green one is much more
common. In fact, I think I have seen the moon looking like every other
sort of cheese except a green cheese. I have seen it look exactly like a
cream cheese: a circle of warm white upon a warm faint violet sky above
a cornfield in Kent. I have seen it look very like a Dutch cheese,
rising a dull red copper disk amid masts and dark waters at Honfleur.
I have seen it look like an ordinary sensible Cheddar cheese in an
ordinary sensible Prussian blue sky; and I have once seen it so naked
and ruinous-looking, so strangely lit up, that it looked like a Gruyere
cheese, that awful volcanic cheese that has horrible holes in it, as
if it had come in boiling unnatural milk from mysterious and unearthly
cattle. But I have never yet seen the lunar cheese green; and I
incline to the opinion that the moon is not old enough. The moon, like
everything else, will ri