"Enough is as Good as a Feast" or Possibly Better

"Enough is as good as a feast" has become my very favorite proverb.

 

It's  a warning against crass consumerism, against materialism, against the excesses of capitalist acquisitiveness. Cold water in a jelly glass, it asserts, is as good as your $500 wine in crystal. As they used to gloss the proverb, no "avaricious scraping together that knows no bounds."  

 

But for a fully "mature" guy like me, the proverb carries not only a figurative but a plain literal instruction, i.e., "do yourself a favor, eat less." Enough is as good as a feast if a feast makes your stomach swell, makes you heavy-lidded and gassy and passive, and if you feel a heck of a lot better when you haul yourself away from the Table of Plenty long before you reach satiety.

 

I can remember, as a voracious adolescent, eating three large, overstuffed hamburgers at a single sitting -- the roll overflowing with tomatoes, onions, relish, ketchup, etc. Along with a bottomless bowl of fries. And craving more. Then as a vigorous young man, a good portion was two hamburgers. Nowadays, I go halves with a friend. Hold the fries.

 

When my grandmother dished up those glorious blintzes of my youth, eight was my number. Now my number is -- one. And I feel the better for it.

 

Digestion is slower and, I suppose, less efficient. And then there's the embarrassing fact that hamburgers and blintzes and everything else settles right in the enlarged belly, the "front porch."

 

So here's a proverb for this latter age: "enough is better than a feast." Much. 

 

By the way, I first encountered the proverb, believe it or not, as the title to William Wager's 1581 morality. And then in Latin in Shakespeare's Love's Labor's Lost, where, Sir Nathaniel and the pedant Holofernes come on stage having just completed, apparently, a more than substantial dinner. "Holofernes:  'Satis quod sufficit.'" Perhaps Holofernes paraphrases and simplifies Horace:   

 

Multa petentibus
Desunt multa.
Bene est, cui deus obtulit
Parca, quod satis est manu.

 

(Those who seek for much are left in want of much. Happy is he to whom God has given, with sparing hand, as much as is enough.)