In college, my first oyster, which—like reading, coffee, beer, liquor, certain sex acts—I liked less at first than I liked the idea of liking, of being The Kind of Person Who.
My memory now is not of the taste of that oyster, but of the thrill of novelty, consumption-as-initiation, which takes on a taste (brine) and a temperature (on ice).
In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry warns of the threat that generalizing poses to our ability to recognize beauty—how thinking generically can obscure precisely what is thrilling about specific iterations of the generalized thing. To illustrate her point, she quotes Proust on the unappealing category of the “good book”: “So it is that a well-read man will at once begin to yawn with boredom when one speaks to him of a new ‘good book,’ because he imagines a sort of composite of all the good books that he has read, whereas a good book is something special, something unforeseeable…”
Beauty,” Scarry advises, “always takes place in the particular.” In general, I agree. But Proust knew something, too, about how a category can be made beautiful—as if illuminated—by the presence of a cherished iteration within. If beauty is, as Scarry suggests, an event, it is one that can reverberate across time and place.
When I eat an oyster, I am not returned to that first oyster so much as I am granted access to a continuum of all the oysters I have ever eaten. I go back to tables and bar tops in restaurants that have closed and cities to which I cannot, at present, travel; to tender, unconsidered proximity with my far-flung friends—Sophia and Natasha and Diana and Shiv and Dana and Marlowe and Seanne; to glasses of champagne and pints of beer and too many martinis; to the laughter and gossip and #processing through which the love was grown and grown and grown. Even an exception—leaving Jacques’s, when I lived there, after an argument and then ordering a dozen, to be eaten as dinner, alone—gets folded into the category, which is lit like the bar was that night: gold and low and soft, forgiving everyone.
What does an oyster taste like, if I’ve never eaten just one? Like oysters.
What do oysters taste like, if every oyster tastes different? Like promise fulfilled and somehow still promise—the plate not yet empty.
It has been many months since I last ate oysters; this is the first summer of my adulthood in which I cannot expect to. No matter: I don’t have to taste them to taste them. It is enough to be refreshed.
In the meantime, tell your friends!