One can learn about wines and pursue the education of one's palate with great enjoyment all of a lifetime, the palate becoming more educated and capable of appreciation and you having constantly increasing enjoyment and appreciation of wine enough though the kidneys may weaken, the big toe become painful, the finger joints stiffen, until finally, just when you love it the most you are finally forbidden wine entirely. Just as the eye which is only a good healthy instrument to start with becomes, even though it is no longer strong and is weakened and worn by excesses, capable of transmitting constantly greater enjoyment to the brain because of the knowledge or ability to see that it has acquired. Our bodies all wear out in some way and we die, and I would rather have a palate that will give me the pleasure of enjoying completely a Chateaux Margaux or a Haut Brion, even though excesses indulged in in the acquiring of it has brought a liver that will not allow me to drink Richebourg, Corton, or Chambertin, than to have the corrugated iron internals of my boyhood when all red wines were bitter except port and drinking was the process of getting down enough of anything to make you feel reckless. The thing, of course, is to avoid having to give up wine entirely just as, with the eye, it is to avoid going blind. But there seems to be much luck in all these things and no man can avoid death by honest effort nor say what use any part of his body will bear until he tries it.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

One More for the Hymnal: Victoria Williams "You R Loved"

Taylor Marshall on Drinking and Marijuana

At his blog, Thomistic scholar Taylor Marshall argues that smoking pot is immoral/unnatural because it’s analogous to drunkenness, which dulls a man’s powers of reason and therefore is a sin. Marshall, who enjoys his single malt, says a little bit of drinking is fine, but there’s a line between being “merry at heart” and being “drunk as a skunk.” And that line is where drinking starts to diminish your rational capacities.

Nothing against weed, but since it’s not the thrust of this blog, I want to focus on the argument Marshall makes regarding alcohol.

Marshall writes:

Humans use logic. We are rational. We have an intellect. Humans play chess. Humans follow the rules of grammar. Humans build suspension bridges. Humans paint images. Humans travel to the moon and back. Humans write novels. This is what makes humans like God and the angels. Our logical, rational, intellect is the greatest gift that God granted our species.

Then he goes on, “Drunkenness is evil because it blurs and muddies our highest faculty – rationality. Think about it. When a person is drunk, he resorts to how animals act. Drunk people act irrationally.”

Here’s his first mistake. Drunk people don’t act like animals. True, animals aren’t rational, but their actions are almost always rationally explainable in relation to a few simple urges: self-preservation, reproduction, etc. Drunk people are, um, less predictable. Which is why the next morning for them sometimes looks like this:

G.K. Chesterton gets this. In “Wine When It Is Red,” Chesterton writes: “The real case against drunkenness is not that it calls up the beast, but that it calls up the Devil. It does not call up the beast, and if it did it would not matter much, as a rule; the beast is a harmless and rather amiable creature, as anybody can see by watching cattle.”

Cattle don’t generally wake up in hotel rooms with tigers and strippers and human babies.

Marshall's second mistake is thinking he can draw a bright line between being "merry" and being "drunk," and that that line comes with the diminishment of rationality. All drinking diminishes our capacity for reason--that's the deal you make when you slug back that shot.  What Marshall really means is that proper drinking doesn't diminish our rationality too much.

Which is fine to say, but a difficult guide in practice. Especially since the act of drinking itself makes it harder to reason about whether or not the next drink is a good idea. After all, most people who end up "drunk" started out aiming to get "merry."

Besides, I think Marshall kind of misses the point. You can't drink well if you're always worried about drinking sensibly, because drinking well sometimes means letting go of being sensible.

Chesterton agrees. "Certainly," he writes, "the safest way to drink is to drink carelessly."

In a 1969 interview with the Paris Review, the poet Robert Graves said that "The academic never goes to sleep logically, he always stays awake. By doing so, he deprives himself of sleep. And he misses the whole thing, you see."

That's part of what Chesterton's getting at. Drinking, at its best, is a shrugging off of responsibility, of care, of the need for logic. That's the joy of a happy hour at the end of a workday, or of a few glasses of champagne at a wedding. It's a way of saying Let's be useless for a while.

And this is a good thing. Look again at Marshall's list of things that mark us as human: writing novels, painting images, traveling to the moon and back. Marshall's right, we wouldn't do those things if we were animals. But we also wouldn't do them if we were totally logical, if we only focused on doing what was useful or what made logical sense.

The trick is to do these things so that they call up the angels and not the devil. I'm not saying that's easy, or that there's no risk involved. "All the human things are more dangerous than anything that affects the beasts," says Chesterton. But when it comes to drinking (or anything useless) the risk is mixed up with the good. And what you can't do--what I think Marshall is trying to do--is seal off one from the other.