Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifton Fadiman

Cheese turns a humble, perishable staple into something that can outlast the season, the journey, even the cow. In one compact line, Clifton Fadiman flatters a domestic miracle with the language of myth: “milk’s leap towards immortality.” It’s funny because it’s grandiose, and it’s grandiose because it’s true. Milk is urgency in liquid form; cheese is patience, craft, and controlled decay. The joke lands on that paradox: rot, managed correctly, becomes culture.

Fadiman was a midcentury man of letters, a public-facing intellectual who made erudition sound like dinner-table conversation. This kind of metaphor is his sweet spot: a wink at high culture (immortality, transcendence) stapled to a lowly food (cheese) that everyone understands viscerally. The specific intent isn’t to romanticize dairy so much as to praise human ingenuity - the ability to take nature’s most fleeting gifts and push them, through technique and time, into something stable, shippable, and storied.

Subtextually, it’s also an argument for preservation as civilization. Cheese is a technology disguised as indulgence. It’s what happens when scarcity teaches people to invent flavor. In an era before “artisanal” became a marketing tag, Fadiman treats everyday transformation as worthy of awe, while still keeping the tone lightly sardonic: immortality, sure - if you can keep it away from the fridge thief.