Ilse’s Reviews > The Last Supper > Status Update
Ilse
is on page 123 of 256
The spaghetti alle vongole is so delicious that it has a kind of holiness about it. Trained as we now are on sheep's milk cheese and white Italian flour, purged of our promiscuous tastes, we are capable of understanding it. It is our prize, our reward, this understanding. A pile of empty clam-shells remains on my plate like the integuments of a poem whose meaning I have finally teased out.
— Dec 19, 2025 03:04AM
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Ilse’s Previous Updates
Ilse
is on page 200 of 256
It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children's bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears: only in art does the quality of humanity favour survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant doesn't erase.
— Dec 20, 2025 05:58AM
Ilse
is on page 194 of 256
I am thinking about the future, though these thoughts are wordless and indistinct.. They are like running water, they pour towards an edge, a precipice,and tumble over the side. I don't want to go home Life could become flat again. It is desire that is big and grand and treacherous; desire, not life.
— Dec 20, 2025 05:55AM
Ilse
is on page 187 of 256
We turn to art to dignify our eexperience of the world;to find a reply to the question of consciousness.But I, too, have a qualm about the Fra Angelicos, the Peruginos.It is that they belong to the past.Their reality is so remote from our own:I fear to look at them is a form of nostalgia.I fear the feeling of sadness they cause me, sadness that our own world is not more beautiful.
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)
— Dec 20, 2025 05:34AM
(paradoxical thought, if you ask me)
Ilse
is on page 140 of 256
In England,I became increasingly sure that to possess sth was to arrest knowledge of it, because the thing itself is no longer free. For me the pain of knowledge is a tonic, an antidote to the pall of possession.But there is an element of death in knowledge.Knowledge is what remains to the human mind once the possession has been lost.Its presence is painful,because it signifies that what was known is no longer there.
— Dec 20, 2025 02:01AM
Ilse
is on page 120 of 256
We eat sheep's milk cheese and tomatoes. We eat the rough white bread. It is strange to eat the same things over and over again.It is not that we dislike this new, narrow range of satisfactions: on the contrary, the idea of eating at a wider scope begins to seem more and more grotesque. It is important to be satisfied by what is known to you. Is that not a basic truth, biblical like the olive tree?
— Dec 12, 2025 03:25AM
Ilse
is on page 41 of 256
In the old town an atmosphere of unusual refinement prevails. Every infelicitous speck of modernity has been sieved out. Of course, the beautiful islands of the past in their turbid oceans of modernity are to be found all over Europe, in England too. At the heart of every hideous human settlement we find an image of our predeceased ancestor, aestheticism. It is our lot to defend that image, lifeless as it might seem.
— Dec 08, 2025 08:49AM
Ilse
is on page 39 of 256
After the exhilaration of escape, we find that we are all still here, unaltered. But we did not come here to find ourselves: we came for something we are able to identify only by its absence.
— Dec 07, 2025 08:49AM
Ilse
is on page 30 of 256
We have closed the door on England as one would close the door on a dark and cluttered house and walk out into the sun. It is this release, from the feeling of interiority, that I relish the most. Yet I love its darkness and clutter, its shady labyrinths of memory and emotion. They give rise to feelings of outward misshapenness, but they have their own value, the heavy metal coins of Englishness.
— Dec 06, 2025 03:05AM
Ilse
is on page 26 of 256
At home I often felt that our life lacked beauty:I looked for it in music,in poetry and painting,in the world itself,when a particular evening sky or fall of light,a glimpse of city trees in leaf,seemed to become more than itself. I would put peonies in a vase,tidy up,but I never found much art in daily things.There was always too much reality churning just ahead,mixing everything together into a grey agitated mass.
— Dec 03, 2025 08:29AM
Ilse
is on page 15 of 256
Always the effort of resistance, of counter-motion, of breaking off into what is untried and unknown: yet the unknown seems in its distance and blank mystery to contain for me a form of hope, a strange force that is pure possibility.
— Nov 29, 2025 02:33AM
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Thank you so much, wishing you a wonderful Christmas time and a delightful New Year in turn, dear Maria. I can relate to the food love, the talking and the smells being equally important as the food itself, it brings people together, as we soon will witness again when the grandchilden celebrate their oma, my mother, preparing a Christmas meal of which they will dream the rest of the year. Only she can make it taste that special and delicious. When I think about food in Portugal, I remember being surprised to see people having a cup of coffee with a small pastry in the morning, it was many years before the days that there was a coffee place with coffee to go on each corner here :).. Which kind of Portuguese food makes your heart particularly happy?I read that Italian cooking has been awarded special cultural heritage status by the United Nations' cultural agency Unesco, which leaves me wondering what is it exactly that they awarded (a critical voice 'A heritage not of recipes, but of feelings; conveniently vague, pleasantly flattering and not entirely falsifiable.')
I read an interesting opinion about the Unesco recognition of Italy's culinary heritage - which was that it was nonsense - people were migrating out of Italy deep into the 20th century because they were hungry, widespread availability of sea food, meat, and cheese is a post war phenomena & I imagine much the same is true of most European countries.Maybe Cusk's experience is the authentic one - people having a very limited repetitive diet, very rarely exposed to something exceptional like the blessed pasta alle vongole
Oh, I didn’t know could write like that, Ilse!
Jan-Maat wrote: "I read an interesting opinion about the Unesco recognition of Italy's culinary heritage - which was that it was nonsense - people were migrating out of Italy deep into the 20th century because they were hungry.."That was indeed an excellent piece (it was that critical voice I was quoting) - and reminded me of the nonsense on meat belonging to the 'traditional' way of eating the minister of agriculture recently blabbered which provoked critical response from food historians. I liked Cusk's approach on Italian food a lot in this chapter, instead of waxing poetically, she describes how complex it was for her and the family to tune in to the different way of eating and cooking for themselves - with the pasta alle vongole as a festive crown, something exceptional.
Peter wrote: "Oh, I didn’t know could write like that, Ilse!"Cusk's way with words stuns me, Peter - I often find it hard to embrace her often razor-sharp reflections and insights, but I hugely admire how she serves them :)/
Thank you, Ilse.
Wishing you a very happy Christmas and a wonderful 2026.