I don't know much about Alan Fobbs, but from what I've read, it's obvious: he's made a lot of mileage out of nothing.
People who enjoy twizzling their brains while sipping wine and nibbling cheese (who maybe enjoy looking for irony and metaphor and tension and hidden levels of meaning) can probably make a big deal out of something like "No one pauses to think; everyone pauses to eat." They might say that Fobbs wants us to know that we don't think enough, that we satisfy ourselves by filling our guts and petting our glands. But why bother? Is Fobbs saying anything new? Does he change our vision? Does he make us wonder? Does he push us to be better people? wiser people? more sincere or modest or understanding people? Probably not. Nobody cares about Alan Fobbs and those who should probably don't pause to think about it anyway. Even Fobbs knows that.
Of course, somewhere in the intellectual desert, some (maybe obsessive) people somehow might worry over a statement such as "You should open a dinner roll before eating it." ("Well, uh, Fobbs may be saying something about the state of life, about the need to pause to butter our souls and savoring each fluffy tidbit of our minds instead of chowing down.") Or "Awareness of the unknown is almost impossible." (Fobbs may be trying to make us understand our very limitations in our mortal coils.) (Don't ask me what mortal coils are. I don't know--but that sorta sounds good, doesn't it?)
But we could play such games over anything and just like Fobbs, we
could even make things up ourselves to worry about. Try this: "Everybody
knows a zucchini" or "Look in a brook for fishes if they are there" or
"Nobody rides a trolley with eels." Or try this: "Pluck an eyelash and it will
drift somewhat north" or "Alan Fobbs probably knows galoshes." It doesn't
take too much skill to write that sort of thing, and we don't even have to
know anything about zucchini or fish or galoshes as symbols. In fact, we
don't have to know very much at all.