It is almost six years since 'Hitch' was taken from us, but
his wisdom remains:
“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less
bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz
of inspiration when reading or writing. The only worthwhile miracle in the New
Testament—the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana—is a
tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. The
same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the
Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is
circulated. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was
positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The tongue must be untied.
It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the
stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a
mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. Visiting today's Iran, I was
delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on
booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly
take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. These
small revolutions affirm the human.”
Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
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