The second part in my series of Christopher Hitchens’ style diatribes.
Ensure the Marmelade is ready.
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I have discovered, this morning, a new form of rage.
Not irritation. Not impatience. Not the ordinary, low-grade resentment produced by queues, bureaucracy, or the failure of a hotel room key to work on the first attempt.
No.
This is something purer.
A rage so complete in its occupation of the mind that, for several seconds, no rival thought can enter.
Picture yourself, ladies and gentlemen, in the queue for the breakfast buffet.
The food looks excellent. You have your plate. The smell of bacon is already doing its work.
The queue has been moving slowly, but it has been moving, and one accepts this because civilisation depends upon certain small acts of patience.
You are now one person away.
One.
And the person before you arrives at the cold-meat platter. They take the fork. They spear three slices of salami. They place them upon their plate. Then comes the revelation.
They wanted two.
Now, at this point, a reasonable person might imagine that the matter is over.
Of… course… not. The third slice must be returned. And suddenly time changes character.
The fork descends. It misses. It descends again.
The slice folds.
It skids sideways.
The person attempts to pin it against the plate.
It escapes.
They rotate the fork.
They try again.
And what had been, only seconds before, a breakfast buffet has become an existential chamber.
You watch this person repeatedly fail to acquire a piece of cooked meat which is already lying directly in front of them.
And you begin to understand things. You understand why empires collapse. You understand why revolutions begin. You understand, perhaps for the first time, what medieval theologians were attempting to describe when they spoke of purgatory.
Because purgatory, ladies and gentlemen, is not fire.
It is proximity.
It is being close enough to see salvation. Close enough to smell it. Close enough to know that in perhaps twelve seconds you could be eating bacon.
And yet you cannot advance. Why?
Because another adult human being has taken one slice too many of salami and has now devoted the full resources of the human nervous system to putting it back.
There is something almost magnificent about the incompetence.
The task is so small. The consequences are so negligible. And yet the commitment to failure is absolute. At no point does the person consider the obvious solution.
Keep the salami. Eat the salami. Abandon the salami.
Place it anywhere.
What matters now is not the integrity of the cold-meat display. What matters is movement.
But no. The slice must go back.
Correctly.
Precisely.
As though the breakfast buffet were governed by treaty.
And behind them stands a line of people experiencing, collectively, the gradual death of hope.
This is the part which fascinates me: The offender does not know. Of course they do not know.
They are completely at peace.
They possess that extraordinary serenity granted only to people who are obstructing everyone else.
The fork comes down again.
Another miss.
And there, in that instant, you glimpse the true horror of existence.
Not death Not suffering. Not even hunger.
The possibility that the universe may be governed by someone trying to pick up a slice of salami with the wrong end of a fork.
And you are next in line.