Eggs Without Salt Poem by gershon hepner

Without sinning, having sex,
said Luis Buñuel,
is just like eating saltless eggs.
It’s very hard to tell
when you are eating eggs without
some salt just how they taste,
like sinless sex, without a doubt,
both wilderness and waste.

Pankaj Mishra, reviewing Graham Greene’s “A Life in Letters, ” edited by Richard Greene (“Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me, ” NYT Book Review, January 4,2009) , writes:

Greene found a post-imperial role for himself even before Britain lost its empire: a piece of luck just as good as the one that led him, through an expedient conversion to Catholicism, to the discovery of “sin” and the writing of novels that depend for their effect on the assumption — baffling, at least, to this heathen reader — that sex without religion, as Luis Buñuel once put it, is like cooking an egg without salt. Places like Sierra Leone seem to have contained in satisfying measure what Scobie in “The Heart of the Matter” calls “the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up.” In the decades after the war, Greene took his distrust of such deceptions to some of the dingiest corners of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Though apparently weary of civilization, he sought no Rimbaud-style derangement of the senses. Neither the Orient’s supposed voluptuousness nor its spirituality beckoned. Stints at opium dens, brothels and blue movies seem to have been followed rather quickly by gin and tonics at the local British consulate.

1/5/09