March 22, 2012

Tact and taste - two reversibles

Tact and taste, two different senses. Yet, they are so close. In both, we perceive with our two surfaces - that of the skin and that of the tongue. 
Just as like we can use the word tact figuratively, so we can use the word taste. A person with good taste (and tact) is subtle, delicate, elegant... The sensations of taste have been displaced from exquisitely inner ones into external world with reason. The knowledge of your tastes allows you in any sense to have an especially intimate contact with the world and feel all the richness of its shades. 
Sampling is not only recognition by taste of drinks and food. It is an effort to perceive the whole through a small fragment, to learn new things about life and people. 
There is an episode in a Tarantino's movie called True Romance where a young man comes to visit his father with his girlfriend. The father asks him why he loves her. And the son responds: "She has the taste of a peach". When they leave, the girl gives her boyfriend's father a kiss on the lips in a very frank way... The father says as he watches the car go away: "He's right. The peach..."
True Romance, 1993

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