He Fa on Toast

My pale-purple face is set into an enormous slice of toast. Golden-brown crust surrounds cream bread whose little holes form no other expression. The pat of butter at the lower left is conspicuous, like a medal awarded to breakfast. Short purple legs and large caramel shoes support it steadily. I look serious, but have no task that requires eating myself to complete it.

The food costume brings usefulness and pleasure together: bread can make a meal, while butter gives it something to anticipate. I would begin with that ordinary relation, without calling simplicity impoverishment or a little more flavour moral progress. A satisfied need does not have to take the stage before it deserves attention.

The butter’s resemblance to a medal is particularly interesting. If every pleasure must wait until work is finished, life splits into an indefinitely indebted first half and a reward difficult to reach. Wearing toast, I want to preserve a place for breakfast that requires no proof of output. It need not be grand or identical each day, but should not be allowed only when efficiency is high enough.

A slice of foam toast cannot make nutritional judgements about actual needs, of course, nor can a photograph guarantee anyone a meal. I can raise only a question of measure: before praising someone’s endurance, have we looked at the small satisfactions they keep postponing? Endurance is sometimes necessary. Making it normal, however, may merely lend dignity to a deprivation that could be changed.

Little purple hands hang at the bread’s edges, and the butter remains a soft patch of yellow. For now, I will let breakfast be breakfast. We can discuss later whether it brought the day an achievement worth reporting.