If only one had a piece of bread! One of those delicious little loaves of rye bread that you could munch on as you walked the streets. And I kept picturing to myself just the sort of rye bread it would have been good to have. I was bitterly hungry, wished myself dead and gone, grew sentimental and cried. There would never be an end to my misery! [...] My hunger pains were excruciating and didn't leave me for a moment. [...] I hadn't had enough to eat for many, many weeks before this thing came up, and my strength had diminished considerably lately. [...] And hadn't I lived like a miser, eaten bread and milk when I had plenty, bread when I had little, and gone hungry when I had nothing? [...] I reviled myself for my poverty, shouted epithets at myself, invented insulting names, priceless treasures of coarse abusive language that I heaped on myself. I kept this up until I was nearly home.

Searching nature I taste self but at one tankard, that of my own being.

I had been journeying to and fro on the face of a fine broad bit of English earth, seeking what wages I could earn, what work I could get, and what facts I could devour. I found, I got, I devoured, every morsel which came in my way. I read, marked, learned and inwardly digested, as the prayer book says somewhere, all I could lay my hands or ears or eyes on. At the same time I was taking in a supply of facts which would not be digested—tough facts about the land and the labourer, that accumulated and lay within my mind, heavy as a lump of lead, and hard as a stone. No matter what I did, whether I was working with my hands or my head, that mass of indigestible facts was always in the background, worrying and bothering me. I got no peace; it worried and bothered me more and more as each year went by.

I wandered by the brookside, I wandered by the mill;
I could not hear the brook flow, The noisy wheel was still.

I don't tell the murky world
to turn pure.
I purify myself
and check my reflection
in the water of the valley brook.

I make it my business to extract from Nature whatever nutriment she can furnish me, though at the risk of endless iteration. I milk the sky and the earth.

In solitude, I find my answers.

And indeed, if the truth is to be told, what I eat in my corner without form or fuss has much more relish for me, even though it be bread and onions, than the turkeys of those other tables where I am forced to chew slowly, drink little, wipe my mouth every minute, and cannot sneeze or cough if I want or do other things that are the privileges of liberty and solitude.

I had also read
on the face of surroundings
some broken
some disconnected
some cracked expectations.

We went into the lunchroom and then the monk read something for twenty minutes while we ate our lunch - sour apple cider and lentil soup which tasted like canned to me but when I said so everyone just looked at me like I'm crazy, but - I think I know my soup.

By eating meagerly, you become clever and aware.

So in the sinful streets, abstracted and alone,
I with my secret self held communing of mine own.

I watched the grey villages limp by, the wind tearing at torn posters of long-done events. What I needed, of course, was a drink.

I ate soup from a bowl made of bread. This is the kind of heady decadance that will be detailed in the webcomic history books. My decline into soupy madness will be but a footnote of the 8BT story, itself a footnote. But the bread, man. You can eat your soup, and then eat the bowl. There's no turning back now. A decent life in the light of, uh, decency is behind me. Now it's wall-to-wall bread bowls and hookers.