“My father liked his fruit very ripe, so whenever one of us came across an overripe pear we gave it to him,” Natalia Ginzburg writes in The Family Lexicon. “‘Ah, so you give me your rotten pears! What real jackasses you are!’ he’d say with a hearty laugh that reverberated through the apartment, then he’d eat the pear in two bites.”
You can feel it: the almost alcoholic impression a very ripe pear leaves somewhere between your throat and your lungs, a smell more than a taste. It’s the thing that makes a pear drop a pear drop. It’s the thing that makes it feel like you breathed the pear in, that a moment ago it was a piece of fruit in a dark and golden painting, then it was gone.
