Imagine a piece of bread. You don’t have to imagine it, it’s right here in the kitchen, on the breadboard, in its plastic bag, lying beside the bread knife. The
bread knife is an old one you picked up at an auction; it has the word BREAD carved
into the wooden handle. You open the bag, pull back the wrapper, cut yourself a
slice. You put butter on it, then peanut butter, then honey, and you fold it over.
Some of the honey runs out onto your fingers and you lick it off. It takes you
about a minute to eat the bread. This bread happens to be brown, but there is also
white bread, in the refrigerator, and a heel of rye you got last week, round as a full
stomach then, now going moldy. Occasionally you make bread. You think of it as
something relaxing to do with your hands.
Imagine a famine. Now imagine a piece of bread. Both of these things are
real but you happen to be in the same room with only one of them. Put yourself
into a different room, that’s what the mind is for. You are now lying on a thin
mattress in a hot room. The walls are made of dried earth, and your sister, who is
younger than you, is in the room with you. She is starving, her belly is bloated,
flies land on her eyes; you brush them off with your hand. You have a cloth too,
filthy but damp, and you press it to her lips and forehead. The piece of bread is
the bread you’ve been saving, for days it seems. You are as hungry as she is, but
not yet as weak. How long does this take? When will someone come with more
bread? You think of going out to see if you might find something that could be
eaten, but outside the streets are infested with scavengers and the stink of
corpses is everywhere.
Should you share the bread or give the whole piece to your sister? Should
you eat the piece of bread yourself? After all, you have a better chance of living,
you’re stronger. How long does it take to decide?
Imagine a prison. There is something you know that you have not yet told.
Those in control of the prison know that you know. So do those not in control. If
you tell, thirty or forty or a hundred of your friends, your comrades, will be caught
and will die. If you refuse to tell, tonight will be like last night. They always choose
the night. You don’t think about the night however, but about the piece of bread
they offered you. How long does it take? The piece of bread was brown and fresh
and reminded you of sunlight falling across a wooden floor. It reminded you of a
bowl, a yellow bowl that was once in your home. It held apples and pears; it stood
on a table you can also remember. It’s not the hunger or the pain that is killing you
but the absence of the yellow bowl. If you could only hold the bowl in your hands,
right here, you could withstand anything, you tell yourself. The bread they
offered you is subversive, it’s treacherous, it does not mean life.
There were once two sisters. One was rich and had no children, the other
had five children and was a widow, so poor that she no longer had any food left.
She went to her sister and asked her for a mouthful of bread. “My children are
dying,” she said. The rich sister said, “I do not have enough for myself,” and drove
her away from the door. Then the husband of the rich sister came home and
wanted to cut himself a piece of bread, but when he made the first cut, out flowed
red blood.
Everyone knew what that meant.
This is a traditional German fairy tale.
The loaf of bread I have conjured for you floats about a foot above your
kitchen table. The table is normal, there are no trap doors in it. A blue tea towel
floats beneath the bread, and there are no strings attaching the cloth to the
bread or the bread to the ceiling or the table to the cloth, you’ve proved it by
passing your hand above and below. You didn’t touch the bread though. What
stopped you? You don’t want to know whether the bread is real or whether it’s just
a hallucination I’ve somehow duped you into seeing. There’s no doubt that you can
see the bread, you can even smell it, it smells like yeast, and it looks solid enough,
solid as your own arm. But can you trust it? Can you eat it? You don’t want to
know, imagine that.

How does the amount of bread in each setting affect the bread's value or importance? What other factors or circumstances change the value of the bread throughout the story?