In search of lost balance
Edited excerpt from Drinking with Proust (Leanpub) Image: Advert for Vin Mariani, a lithograph by Jules Chéret, 1894 We oscillate between stimulation and rest but seek a balanced life. Caffeine lifts us up, alcohol winds us down. Why not just mix the two? The eighteenth century Scottish physician John Brown argued that to be alive is not a natural state, but a forced state. We tend towards dissolution at every moment, he wrote, and are kept from it only by “foreign powers, and even by these with difficulty, and only for a time; and then, from the necessity of … fate” we “yield to death.”29 In order to stave off dissolution and stay balanced, Brown argued, you have to harness the “foreign powers” available to you. Brown’s substances of choice were seasoned food, alcohol and opium. Spirituous or vinous drink, in which the alcohol is always diluted, stimulates more quickly, and more readily, than seasoned food, and its stimulus is in proportion to the quantity of alcohol that it contains. But there are stimuli, which possess an operation as much quicker, and more …