Dear Johannes,
I am writing to you again about wine, and other spirits, though this time not to vindicate them. As you may have heard, drinking is bad for us. Even moderate tippling seems to carry long-term health risks, and, according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, heavy drinking is really terrible, and I regret to inform you that the NIAAA defines heavy drinking as anything more than 14 drinks in a week, a limit we may have sometimes exceeded during graduate school.
But I am less worried that drinking may be bad for our health than I am that it may be bad for us on a deeper level. I’m not alone. In his late, grumpy period, Tolstoy wrote an essay called “Why Do Men Stupefy Themselves?” It is a furious polemic against everything from vodka to cigarettes, not because they are unhealthy but because they lead people into immorality: “The use of these things is manifestly injurious,” he thunders, “producing terrible evils, known and confessed by every one, causing the destruction of more human beings than have perished in all wars and contagious diseases together.”
Apparently, he was much taken with the U.S. temperance movement and tried to institute its precepts in his household, and then among the local peasants (no word on his success).
The reason we drink or smoke, he says, is that “a sober man has conscientious scruples about going to dissolute women, about stealing, about committing murder. A drunken man has no such scruples; and so if a man wishes to commit an act which his conscience forbids him to do he stupefies himself.”
As is usual with the late Tolstoy, this seems exaggerated. Even after attending many a “Martini Monday,” which you so graciously hosted for years, Johannes, I never stole, or murdered, or visited dissolute women. And yet, as is also usual with the late Tolstoy, we should not dismiss him as an aging crank, either. I recognize myself in his essay, albeit with a twist. He says alcohol frees men to do what they know they shouldn’t, while I have more often found that it helps me avoid doing what I know I should.
1. The Stress of Attention
In graduate school, I would often sit down in the afternoon to write. Sometimes it was my dissertation, sometimes something more like this, the kind of essay I would have told you I really wanted to write. Yet I didn’t. There I was, on a Saturday afternoon, sitting on a couch with the computer open in front of me and all the time in the world to write whatever I liked. I looked at the page, and nothing happened. I wondered what to say. I had no idea how to begin, and if I managed to do that, my mind then reeled with a hundred new difficulties. What came next? How should one point follow another? Was what I had written obvious or obscure? Half-baked or belabored? Blandly agreeable or obnoxious? Overwhelmed, panicky, and adrift on the sea of the white screen, I would then cast around desperately for some distraction to hang on to. Was it one pm yet? Were there basketball games on? Why not have a beer and the TV on in the background while I write? I turned on the TV, had a beer, and made myself comfortable. The first beer muffled my anxiety, the second put any thought of getting anything done out of my head for the rest of the afternoon.
In later years, after I was gainfully employed, I faced the same problem, only at dinnertime instead of after lunch. It was so nice to have a glass of wine after a day of work. And why not a second? Of course, then, when I sat down to write, I found myself unable to concentrate properly. No matter! I thought, giving it up for the evening. There’s always tomorrow. To be honest, Johannes, I suspect some self-sabotage here. Writing is difficult, my reach always exceeds my grasp, but that second glass of wine at the dinner table? Nothing could be easier to reach for.
Tolstoy knew me well. “[The] stress of attention constitutes labor,” he noted. “In every labor, especially at its commencement, there is a period when the labor seems difficult, painful, but human weakness suggests the desire to shirk it. Physical labor is painful at first; still more so is intellectual labor.” As a young man, drinking and smoking turned off the critical voice of his conscience, allowing him to write more easily, while for me it simply let me avoid writing altogether, replacing frustration with pleasure to boot.
Although I think Tolstoy is astute on the pain of labor, I think he underplays the physiological satisfaction of wine, cigarettes, or any stupefying substance. Intellectual pleasure is possible but it requires strenuous effort and probably always will, while the narcotic offers effortless happiness. It does so, I think, on several levels. Physically, after a few drinks one feels warm and mellow, time passes easily, and the edges of the world soften. Socially, we become effortlessly funny and brilliant, our ideas more expansive and bolder, and our arguments ever-more irrefutable—at least by our own reckoning. So, given the bottle’s many benefits, why avoid it? Why not take the shortcut to happiness?
The answer was not clear to me, which was a problem. Not the obvious kind of drinking problem, since again I never wrapped my car around a tree or frequented a house of ill fame. Even so, something was amiss. In the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition, under the entry on “substance use disorders,” I find criteria like “using more of a substance or more often than intended,” “inability to complete tasks at home, work, or school,” and “giving up on up activities they used to care about because of their substance use.” To an extent, that was me.
In truth, the second afternoon beer or evening glass of wine were more dangerous than your Martini Mondays, more dangerous even than the departmental happy hours that went from Friday afternoon to Saturday morning. The reason is right at the end of the DSM-V designation: “substance use disorder.” I’m not sure why that term was chosen, probably to avoid the negative connotations of addiction and sound a bit more scientific, but it always reminds me of the venerable ethical traditions—classical or religious—that are concerned with the proper ordering of our goods and loves. Aristotle, and later Aquinas, taught that human beings were at once animal, social, and rational beings, and these parts of our natures could be satisfied in different ways. Neither thinks physical and social enjoyment are wrong per se, especially in moderation. Even so, true flourishing ultimately meant satisfying the rational soul, through philosophy or the contemplation of God (if that is not redundant). Drinking is dangerous because it can get in the way of pursuing rational happiness, or even replace it.
That last point requires elaboration. Alongside the more obvious pleasures of drink, the physical and social, I also noticed another, subtler, more insidious one. After a couple of drinks, I was pervaded by a sense of general wellbeing. I felt good about myself, the state of my life, and my future too. I was supposed to be writing my dissertation or other essays, and I wasn’t, but I felt expansive anyway; my plans for future intellectual accomplishments were clear and attainable, so certain and inevitable that I could practically enjoy the feeling of their accomplishment in the here and now.
It was pure self-deception, naturally, a feeling of wellbeing that was entirely disconnected from the state of affairs outside of my head. This is why drinking, or any other form of drug use, can act as a pharmakon: both remedy and poison. If life is frustrating or difficult, beer, wine, or whiskey can offer both real physical pleasure and the simulacra of higher-order well-being. It’s specious, of course. In the cold light of morning, the illusion has vanished, and one is left with a headache and, what can be worse, feelings of disappointment, regret, or even, eventually, despair. These could occasion further drinking, as ones seek to escape unhappy circumstances again. It isn’t hard to see this ending in a vicious circle.
2. The Long Obedience
Obviously, that is a fate to be avoided, though so is going teetotal and joining a Tolstoyan commune. On the other hand, I must admit that the most productive period of my life, from a literary point of view, was last year, when I set myself a strict rule that I wouldn’t even have a glass of wine with dinner. That way, when I settled down to write, I was as sober as a Nazarene.
Repression requires remission, of course, so on weekends I indulged, albeit within reason. Around 9 pm every Friday night, after putting my daughter to bed, I drank half a bottle of wine, saving the second half for Saturday night. That was just enough to make me feel larger than life as I watched Indonesian action movies or sang along with videos of Irish folk songs. I enjoyed this setup so much that at times I became unsociable. When friends asked me to come out and enjoy the Los Angeles nightlife, I caught myself thinking things like “but I was going to finish the Mourvedre and sing along with the Clancy Brothers!”
The key, though, is that once I figured out where I could fit my scribbling into the week, I endeavored to bind it as a law upon my heart. It was amazing how much could get done, if I were slavishly consistent. Nietzsche is good on this point. “What is essential,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, is “that there should be obedience over a long period of time and in a single direction.” Long obedience was necessary, he thought, for excellence in everything that makes human life worthwhile: “virtue, art, music, dance, reason, spirituality—something transfiguring, subtle, mad, and divine.” Nietzsche’s chief exemplars of long obedience are not, as one might expect, heroic rebels. Instead, they are those who dedicated their lives to something like a monarch, a church, or Aristotelian metaphysics—theologians and painters and architects and poets who spent decades building cathedrals or painting chapels or devising equally intricate systems of thought.
This might seem surprising, but it shouldn’t be. Anyone who despises anything as much as Nietzsche despised Christianity must, on some level, be envious. Those monks and theologians had good reasons for their long obedience, and their works endure as testaments to the subtle, mad, and divine potential of the human animal. Of course, Nietzsche thought they were deluded, their psychologies “gruesome” and “anti-rational,” but he was also too far-sighted to think that once their beliefs and the strictures that accompanied them were gone, then art and culture would flourish naturally. On the contrary, “every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his ‘most natural’ state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of ‘inspiration’—and how strictly he obeys thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation.”
Dear Friedrich is thought to be a prophet of expressive individualism, in which everyone casts off old beliefs in order to live out their private truths. Yet I see something different here. Nietzsche isn’t clear about where, exactly, his hypothetical artist’s “thousandfold laws” come from, but I would like to suggest that they are not coming from within him. On what I admit may be my own eccentric reading, I think the way he describes the process of inspiration (“ordering, placing, disposing, giving form”) makes it sound like the artist is not creating something ex nihilio but rather pursuing an intuitive sense of a pattern or form that’s already inherent in whatever he or she is making, and which becomes more or less evident depending on the artists’ success in realizing it. If so, that would place him closer to an Aristotelian (or Thomist) teleology than he’s usually given credit for—at least in the realm of art. Certainly, Nietzsche thinks that fidelity, the long obedience, is crucial for human flourishing. Lose the ability to persist, and you would “perish and lose the last respect for yourself.”
Although Nietzsche was worried about the effects of long religious obedience, surely the difficulty today is achieving any sort of longstanding obedience at all. Whether he saw it coming or not (and I suspect he had an inkling), there would come a day when rebellion became easier than fidelity. To take only the most obvious example, today any idiot can dispose of marital fidelity for less than $100. Faithfulness, on the other hand, cannot be bought at any price, and it is the work of a lifetime. Conversely, disobedience has enjoyed widespread cultural approval since at very least the late 1960s, reaching an apotheosis in a 1989 Burger King commercial where a young Ben Affleck learns that “sometimes you’ve got to break the rules.” And it’s not only crass commercialism. Modernism and post-modernism as artistic movements both set themselves the task of throwing out every rule they could find in favor of playful jouissance.
Sometimes, maybe, you’ve got to break the rules, but a lifetime of doing so would plainly be incompatible with long obedience in a single direction. My own inability to turn off the TV and keep the beer or wine in the pantry were only, I suspect, a species of a generic problem. Since American culture, high and low, celebrates the constant pursuit of novelty and easy pleasure, and our economy more or less requires it, I feel safe in saying that it is fundamentally inhospitable to the long obedience, and therefore to the forms of human flourishing—secular or religious—that are most conducive to our higher-order happiness, our good, and even our self-respect. This is to say nothing of digital and social media, and their designs to hack our serotonin systems and thereby absorb as much of our attention as possible.
So why do we stupefy ourselves? For the sake of enjoyment. Because it’s the advice we get from every television and computer screen. Because life is often painful and frustrating, especially during this interminable pandemic, and a good stupor is a welcome respite. Yet also, I suspect, because the long obedience is difficult, both difficult to endure and scary to even set out on. You might fail, of course. How much better to never find out, and enjoy yourself instead! There is also the omnipresent possibility that we may be placing our loyalties wrongly, obeying the wrong laws, if we can detect any of them at all. In short, it’s easy to fear that we are misspending our lives. In the face of all that anxiety, doesn’t a drink sound good?
3. The Fireside
As I said, I struck a balance last year. Obedience to the muses during the week, to Bacchus after 9 pm on Fridays. Still, this wasn’t entirely satisfactory. It depended on an unfortunate dichotomy between the two kinds of happiness, the physiological and the rational. On the one hand, the undeniable pleasure, stupefying though it may be, of 2.5 glasses of wine and the Clancy Brothers. On the other hand, a long sober obedience. The former was lovely, while the latter was, at times, as pleasant as ascending a frigid alpine peak in inadequate clothing. It was all so austere. Did I really want to be laying on my death bed and think that I had done my duty, earned my self-respect through dedication to a higher calling, and all it had taken was making sure I didn’t enjoy myself too much or too often? Can the long obedience never be pleasant or—dare to dream—cozy?
Recently, Johannes, I have settled on a scheme for having it all.
On the side of the house I’m renting there is a sliding door, almost invisible to the eye. Open it up and you will find a little box in the wall, like the priest’s hole in an old English country house. It is filled with wood. On the other side of this little box is another sliding door, covered in foam board, which opens directly onto my living room. It is right next to a fat black wood stove. Most days after work, I slide open the door, pull out some wood, and build a fire in the stove, which then snaps, cracks, and rumbles as it heats the whole lower floor of the house.
In the evening, after I’ve put my daughter to bed upstairs, I put on my flannel pajamas and go back downstairs. I make myself cocoa or tea, as the mood strikes me, and place another log on fire. The golden flames are more brilliant than the finest bourbon, the heat emanating from the stove is warmer than rye, and its smoke is more pungent than scotch.
Watching the fire for a while, I observe that it is about the most pleasant way a man can spend an evening, Johannes. Then I settle down to write to you.
Paul