Sweet

I’m fond of that passage in Scripture, where we hear that Jonathan, the son of King Saul, was exhausted after a battle, and he found some honey on the ground in the woods. So he took the staff in his hand and dipped it into the honey, and tasted it, and the light came back into his eyes. What a great image that is — and it makes me want to reach for something sweet, right now.

In every human language, sweetness is a mark of affection. “Don’t yank my head back like that, Candy,” says the motherly cook Berenice to the little boy John Henry, who’s just asked which of her two eyes is her “mind’s eye.” “Me and Frankie ain’t going to float through the ceiling and leave you.” Candy is what she always calls him. That’s in the film The Member of the Wedding, which has moments of inexpressible sweetness, all the sweeter in this case because it’s a sad story, and deeply human. “Come and kiss me, sweet and twenty,” sings the wise clown Feste in Twelfth Night, for “Youth’s a stuff will not e…