Life's Pleasures Quote by M. F. K. Fisher

Memory, for M. F. K. Fisher, doesn`t arrive as a neat slideshow of milestones. It comes uncorked. The line refuses the modern self-help fantasy that a life can be narrated as pure interiority, detached from appetite, place, and circumstance. Fisher makes wine the bloodstream of recollection: not a garnish to experience but the medium through which experience is stored, retrieved, and given meaning.

The syntax does the heavy lifting. That long, tumbling chain of clauses mimics how sensory memory actually works: associative, looping, unable to stay polite. She doesn`t just remember wine; she remembers "where they grew" and "why I drank them when I did" - a map of terroir and timing, of social situation and private need. The repeated "why" is the tell. This isn`t connoisseurship for its own sake. It`s an audit of desire: what she was hungry for, what she was celebrating, what she was enduring.

Then she slips in labor - "why I picked the grapes" - puncturing any fantasy of wine as effortless luxury. Wine is culture, yes, but also work, weather, bodies. Even "the oldest procurable bottles" carries a faintly comic, faintly melancholy awareness: you can chase age, rarity, the illusion of permanence, but only up to what the world will allow you to "procure."

The final comparison is almost startlingly intimate. Breathing is the baseline of being alive; Fisher elevates taste and its attendant stories to the same status. Subtext: a life without sensual attention isn`t austere, it`s barely lived.