Not by bread alone

Forty days without food, and the first temptation is the obvious one: you are hungry, you have power, make bread. His answer is that bread is not the only food, and that a person fed only on bread is starving in a way he does not notice.

Everyone who fasts discovers this at about the thirty-sixth hour. The hunger for food quiets, and underneath it there is another hunger you had been feeding with meals so you would not have to feel it. The fast uncovers it. Then the question is what you will feed it with, and the answer is the word: reading slowly, silence, the presence that does not run out.