Saturday, July the 3rd, 2004

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Happy Birthday, Franz

Today is, or would be, Franz Kafka's 121st birthday. Two things worth remembering about Mr K. Although one thinks of him as a haunted, pallid, neurasthenic wreck, he was in fact an enthusiastic oarsman who enjoyed rowing boats. The other thing I find quite arresting is that he was a keen Fletcherist, which made his table manners trying, to say the least. Fletcherism was (is) a system of eating which involves chewing each bite of food until it becomes a watery mass in your mouth before swallowing. This has two effects. First, if you chew a bite of food that long, you will be consuming your meal at a slower rate. Secondly, the reduction of this food to liquid goo means that it will be less difficult to extract the nutrients. I am not sure whether it is true that the recommended number of mastications is thirty-two (one for each tooth). Horace Fletcher (1849-1919) was an American businessman from Lawrence, Massachusetts who expounded his theories in a number of excitingly-titled books, including Fletcherism : What It Is or How I Became Young At Sixty, The New Menticulture, The AB-Z Of Our Own Nutrition, and The New Glutton Or Epicure. He was known to cycle up to two hundred miles a day. Other notable Fletcherists included John D Rockefeller, Upton Sinclair, and Henry James. Incidentally, I read somewhere that Henry James in his final years became deluded and was convinced that he was Napoleon Bonaparte.

Fletcherism ought not be confused with Daltonism, which is the technical term for colour blindness. John Dalton (1766-1844) was a British chemist and physicist, born at Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth in Cumberland. In 1794 he published the first scientific paper on the subject, Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours.