If a depressing film on an important subject doesn’t dull our appetite for dinner, are we any the less conscientious? On distrusting extravagant shows of sensibility, in Taki’s Magazine:
I have seen some terrible things in my life—the remains of massacres and so forth—but I am afraid that even they have failed to put me off my dinner, though I have of course not been unmoved by what I saw. Is this fortitude of mind or stark insensibility? I ease my conscience by telling myself that refusal of dinner will help no one.
While a young GP I did a postgraduate diploma in counselling and unlike my psychiatrist husband during his career, I was at that time invited to train as a psychoanalysist (which I politely refused), I think I received the invitation as, asked how I felt about hypothetical situations, I admitted that at funerals I was hungry and enjoyed my food, or maybe it was when I admitted that I would have a lot of difficulty, ie not want to, counsel a known pedophile!