We’re Going for the Cheese

 Last year I reported my embarrassment at discovering that my ongoing thirty-plus-year project of reading all of G. K. Chesterton’s weekly essays for the Illustrated London News would never honor my eyes again with the pieces I had read in the '80s in some collections owned by the Baylor library. It turns out that those were earlier essays written for the Daily News. So I changed my reading plan and made sure this year to reread one of the collections I read and loved almost forty years ago: Alarms and Discursions.

And – bless my soul! – there were all my old favorites. Last year I said I remembered especially a piece called “On Cheese” that began with the line “If all the seas were bread and cheese there would be quite a lot of deforestation in my neighborhood.” That memory was pretty faithful. It turns out that the title is actually just “Cheese,” that the sentiment appears just a few sentences in, not at the very beginning, and that the quotation verbatim runs this way: “If all the trees were bread and cheese there would be considerable deforestation in any part of England where I was living.” Here also was “The Glory of Grey,” in which Chesterton praises not only the beauty of different types of cloudy days in England, but also the fact that bright colors stand out on a dreary day, where on a sunny day even browns are bright. I love cloudy days and soon grew tired of hearing Texans complaining about rainy days, as if water were a bad thing. So this essay played a pivotal role in making me fall in love with Chesterton early in my acquaintance with him. (His extreme veneration for Dickens sealed the deal.)

I had read some, or maybe even all, of these essays to my wife many years ago. We especially enjoyed one called “The Philosophy of Sight-seeing.” Here, Chesterton points out that monuments, even the tomb of an aristocrat, are democratic things: they are meant to be seen by the public. And the public sees them in passing from one business to another or on the way from work to home. Visitors, then, he reasons, will get the proper effect from monuments not by standing in front of them and staring (GKC would have deplored selfies!) but by doing other things around them. We decided that when we returned to Paris, the most authentic way to enjoy the Eiffel Tower would be to eat at a sidewalk café with the Tower in sight.

“Cheese” also gives advice on traveling. Railway stations and tourist attractions all seem about the same anywhere you go, he says, but one thing changes from county to county: cheese. If you want to get a taste – a literal taste – of what unique pleasures a place has to offer, eat the local cheese. After reading this one, Nancy and I branded our new traveling outlook with the phrase “We’re going for the cheese.”

To go off of reading for just a moment, I’ll mention that in more recent times, Rick Steves often corroborated this view in saying that one should travel to Europe to see European people and things, not things that feel comfortable. Don’t stay in the five-star American hotel with other Americans; stay in the pension with the family that doesn’t speak English. He also gave us good advice about taking kids to Europe: let them plan it.

So one evening when our kids were about 8 and 11, we took them to dinner and said, “Look, a music professor is never going to be rich. But we figure we can take you on two good trips before you graduate. Where do you want to go?” They said the northeastern United States (DC, New York, Boston, Niagara Falls, etc.) and Europe. Excellent choices. We took the domestic trip first, standing on top of the trade towers just one month before they came down. (Don’t ask me about those nightmares.) When it came time to plan the European trip, we left almost all of it up to the kids. They told me what they wanted to see, and I made the arrangements.

But as we were getting the details ironed out, we told them The Philosophy: We’re going for the cheese. They ate it up. Well, I mean, they ate the idea up. But after we got to Europe, they definitely ate up the cheese, too. On our way up to the Bernina Pass into Switzerland, we saw a hand-painted sign in front of a small wooden building: Bergkäse. Boy, did we stop fast. and, boy, was that cheese good. And not like any other cheese I’ve ever tasted. The kids ate up other local cuisine, too, and they never once asked to stop at McDonald’s. Just a few days ago, our daughter reminded us of the delicious onion soup we had at a sidewalk café in Paris. “You remember,” she prompted, “at the place where we could see the Eiffel Tower while we ate?”