Reply #120: Sometimes I do see implied statements that may or may not have been [View All]

[eridani]

--anyone's explicit intention.

The following is a quote from an article in the New York Review of Books "Godot Comes to Sarajevo" (Vol XL #17, pp 52-59, October 21, 1993) by Susan Sontag. She went there to put on the play "Waiting for Godot" when Sarajevo was under daily bombardment--people wanted artistic diversion as much as they wanted food. The quote is an aside from the main topic.

The only actor who seemed to have normal stamina was the oldest member of the cast. Ines Fancovic, who is 68. Still a stout woman, she has lost more than 60 pounds since the beginning of the siege, and this may have accounted for her remarkable energy. The other actors were visibly underweight and tired easily. Lucky must stand motionless through most of his long scene but never sets down the heavy bag he carries. Atko, who plays him (and now weighs no more than 100 pounds) asked me to excuse him if he occasionally rested his empty suitcase on the floor throughout the rehearsal period. Whenever I halted the run-through for a few minutes to change a movement or a line reading, all the actors, with the exception of Ines, would instantly lie down on the stage.

Another symptom of fatigue: the actors were slower to memorize their lines than any I have ever worked with. Ten days before the opening they still needed to consult their scripts, and were not word-perfect until the day before the dress rehersal.

It's pretty obvious to me that Ines is energetic not because of weight loss, but because she had the extra weight to lose. Note that she is still fat after having endured severe famine conditions for a couple of years. It seems to have been much easier for her to tolerate going from 300# to 240# (my guess) than for Atko to go from 160# to 100#.

This is a good illustration of why people are fat--more of their ancestors than usual had to withstand conditions like this. It pays to have at least a few people in every society who are still mentally alert and physically capable under high stress conditions, instead of being turned temporarily weak and stupid, even if they have major health disadvantages when times are good.

If you have a metabolism like Ines, the only hope for coming close to "normal" weight is a lifetime commitment to recreating the famine conditions your ancestors experienced, and for some people even that isn't going to work. Society in general seems to think that fat people ought to be required to live under a lifelong state of siege in order to be treated with common respect. I for one would rather have a real life.