Take one last look at this food impaled on your fork, these pieces of lettuce, or bacon, or hard-boiled egg, or chunks of toasted bread. They are out there, someone stood behind a counter and handed you the plate and you carried it over here and sat down. Now, from this plate with its mass of pale-coloured stuff, a fully integrated, unapologetic part of the world's furniture, a paid-up member of objecthood, you have gathered up this fork-full, no less objective for all that the mass from which it was abstracted has for the last few hours and days been treated with the exclusive intention that it would end by being eaten, and you effect its disappearance into your mouth, where immediately, it goes dark, loses forever its visual identity and retains only a diffuse identity as a certain mass of flavour and texture. But these are now experienced by inward senses, those which belong to your tongue and your mouth, fully embodied and inhabited organs. They are made out of world-stuff but are also entirely your stuff, you stuff, their nature is unequivocally distinct from what is not-you. And the food now delivers a vivid pleasure, because you are hungry and your mouth and tongue are avid for intimacy with this stuff and waves of sensory pleasure arise through them, so that you begin to chew in order to open up the food more thoroughly, and you mingle it and dissolve it in spit which is a pure you stuff as long as it stays in your mouth, and the otherness of the food is crushed and spread against your taste-buds so that as much of it becomes taste-able as you can manage. And this goes on for a while and is far from complete before an irresistible impulse to swallow comes over you, to present this mass to your other more deeply buried and less articulate organs which clamour no less for their share in it; and the positive sense of it as any sort of distinct substance now disappears as it is cast into the internal abyss. Has it now become you? Absurd question. It simply no longer exists, it has given everything up in order to become pure satisfaction. That you will re-encounter it a little time ahead, transformed beyond recognition and that it will follow a simplified reverse trajectory and go back into objecthood, is at this moment the furthest thing from your mind.