With everything that’s going on in this country and the world, it can seem trivial to be concerning oneself with wine. Certainly, from some points of view, it is trivial. To which the trivial part of my brain responds “so what?” From one point of view, anything and everything is trivial – and that’s true too, in a far more profound way than most of us are willing to admit. The trivial part of my brain knows something too.
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From another point of view, thinking about wine now is like clinging to the raft of the Medusa. You remember Géricault’s famous painting: exhausted survivors cling to a battered, makeshift raft, trying desperately to signal a far distant ship as a storm approaches and a close-by towering wave is about to crash down on them. Not a pretty picture. Not a pretty thought. Yet true too – from one point of view.
From yet another point of view, talking about wine now is skipping down the yellow brick road with Dorothy and company – a pleasing hallucination, but a hallucination nevertheless. And all the more pleasing because right now the real world – or what we are willing to accept as such – just isn’t comforting or reassuring. And that’s just as true – and as untrue – as the other points of view.
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What lends all these points of view their degree of truth is the underlying fusion of the cosmic-catastrophe scenario and the personal-doom scenario. Which we all fear, but neither of which most of us truly believe in our heart of hearts. If we did, we’d be behaving very differently, and not merely fretting.
Besides all that, I believe firmly in the value of normality and in its continuation. All my life, I have taken great pleasure in wine, in drinking it and in talking about it: That is normal for me, and I see no reason to stop now. My stopping would benefit no one, and would certainly distress me – and I fail to see how that would better the world in any way, except to please the self-righteous, which I always prefer not to do.
On the positive side, wine gives me – and many other people – great pleasure. At my age, as my physical debilities increase, it’s one of the most rewarding simple physical satisfactions I’m still capable of. And important as that is to me, it’s the least of the matter: my nightly wine with dinner is my daily oasis. It relaxes me, it enables me to appreciate my life, it enables me to think clearly – at least as clearly as I ever could – about the things I have to do, the things I want to do, and the things – far fewer – I actually can do. It lets me reflect with tranquility, unfrightened and unpanicked, on the cockamami-ness of the world I have to live in. And I’m pretty sure it confers those benefits on the many other people who love it too – not to mention the benefits it confers on the people all over the world for whom wine provides employment and a decent living. None of that is at all trivial.
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I don’t think that if I were to give up drinking and writing about wine, the worldwide wine industry would collapse – though my doctor seems to think I’m its mainstay. I’d like to believe that, but neither my capacity nor my finances could stand it. No, I’m just an ordinary wine drinker who prefers in these harsh and abrasive times to take daily refuge and comfort where I can easily find them, in a fine wine.
So maybe I am being trivial – but, as Diane will testify, I’ve always had a broad trivial streak, which over my lifetime I’ve grown quite fond of, occasionally to her annoyance. Diane is a much more serious person than I am. So I’ll take refuge in the words of another serious person, Jonathan Swift, one of my favorite authors. He lived in violent and parlous times some 400 years ago, and his thoughtful response to its trials was the pithy, pertinent, eloquent, and eternally trivial Vive la bagatelle!
Shall we open another bottle?
Thank you, Tom.
In the words of Dr. Swift: “Arbitrary power is the natural object of temptation to a prince, as wine and women to a young fellow, or a bribe to a judge, or avarice to old age, or vanity to a woman [the last phrase struck from some Google quotations, whose AI expugns anything at odds with “acceptable” contemporary views].
Works, vol. 14
Oh dear! I wonder if AI will find my views “acceptable.”
At the risk of trivialising your excellent rumination, I’m so pleased that you wrote ‘a hallucination’ and not ‘an hallucination’. I shall drink to that!
The indefinite article can be a real stumbling block, can’t it?
A brilliant article. My thoughts exactly, but wonderfully expressed.
Thank you very much. I’m glad we agree.