Quintets For Robert Morley

Is it possible that hyper- ventilating up Parnassus I have neglected to pay tribute to the Stone Age aristocracy? I refer to the fat. We were probably the earliest civilized, and civilizing, humans, the first to win the leisure, sweet boredom, life-enhancing sprawl that require style. Tribesfolk spared us and cared for us for good reasons. Our reasons. As age's counterfeits, forerunners of the city, we survived, and multiplied. Out of self-defence we invented the Self. It's likely we also invented some of love, much of fertility (see the Willensdorf Venus) parts of theology (divine feasting, Unmoved Movers) likewise complexity, stateliness, the ox-cart and self-deprecation. Not that the lists of pugnacity are bare of stout fellows. Ask a Sumo. Warriors taunt us still, and fear us: in heroic war, we are apt to be the specialists and the generals. But we do better in peacetime. For ourselves we would spare the earth. We were the first moderns after all, being like the Common Man disqualified from tragedy. Accessible to shame, though, subtler than the tall, we make reasonable rulers. Never trust a lean meritocracy nor the leader who has been lean; only the lifelong big have the knack of wedding greatness with balance. Never wholly trust the fat man who lurks in the lean achiever and in the defeated, yearning to get out. He has not been through our initiations, he lacks the light feet. Our having life abundantly is equivocal, Robert, in hot climates where the hungry watch us. I lack the light step then too. How many of us, I wonder, walk those streets in terrible disguise? So much climbing, on a spherical world; had Newton not been a mere beginner at gravity he might have asked how the apple got up there in the first place. And so might have discerned an ampler physics.