"Cheese, by contrast, encompasses the entire range of human experience: birth and sexuality, the fecundity of nature from the sweetness of a wildflower meadow to the musk of a doe in estrus to the
wriggling of mosquito larvae in a stagnant pool, death, decay, vomit, oozing pustules, mystic visions, war atrocities. Well, maybe it's not the whole range of experience. For example, I cannot think of a
cheese that makes me feel the way I felt when I first saw the proof that a certain length of rope, hung in a certain way, takes the shape of the very same catenary arc, regardless of its weight. No, if cheese is unlike grapefruit, it is far far less like mathematics. Mathematics and cheese are in a very precise, dare I say mathematical sense, antonyms. And as you can see, cheese is a bit biased toward
one side of the spectrum of experience, particularly when you get to what I think of as the "advanced" cheeses. As for me, I'm a rank beginner, but I have a theory about cheese."