some other draft from “take and eat”

Tragedy and myth often return to the age before the mouth could refuse—when it was only teeth and tongue, and strength was measured in bites. They dramatize a world in which eating was not a choice but an impulse, where to consume meant to erase. Appetite was absolute. There was no negotiation, no moment of hesitation before the mouth opened. The body took in whatever it could overpower. And in this world, to be eaten was the only alternative to eating.

Cronos’ hunger was such a hunger. His eyes, wide open as Goya shows them, seem to meet ours, but they do not see. There is no recognition, no plea, no rage—only the dull terror of inevitability. He ate his offspring in the futile hope that doing so would arrest time in an unbroken present. But time cannot be swallowed. It devours even the gods. The struggle between fathers and sons has never been about mere succession; it is a horror that mirrors the very nature of consumption itself. To consume is to forestall being consumed. This is the terror that runs beneath all appetite: the knowledge that hunger is never truly laid to rest.

Cronos, the son of Uranus and father of Zeus, is trapped in this cycle. Time itself is shackled to the order of devouring and being devoured. Hunger is law. To live is to feed, to be fed upon. His world has no outside, no breaking point—only an endless chain of consumption stretching forward and back.

But Eve does not belong to this order. She is neither mother nor daughter. No heir waits to overthrow her. At least, not yet. She does not need to kill to sever herself from a past, because she has no past. She is free from inherited hunger. And this is what makes her eating different. She does not eat because she must. She eats because she can.

And here, for the first time, something fractures. Before discernment, there was only devouring. The hunger of Cronos was absolute, unable to be questioned or measured. But when Eve lifts the fruit, something unprecedented occurs—not hesitation, not refusal, but the possibility of eating without being consumed. Hers is not the hunger of the predator, nor the panic of the prey. It is something else entirely.