Drink; The Pleasures of life [Hardcover] Simon, Andre - First Edition (history, culture)

Item Condition: Collectible; Very Good

IN THE beginning... there was water: then came the
Flood, and there was too much water. There has been
plenty of water ever since, for man and beast alike, for
fish and grass, and all forms of life on the face of the earth.
Yet, in spite of this abundance of water, 'if we look about us
with some attention, we are bound to marvel at the enormous
trouble which men take to have wine, as if water, which
Nature provides in plenty, was not the most wholesome
drink for man, as it is for all animals'. So wrote Pliny
(Lib xiv, cap 22) nearly two thousand years ago.
Long before Pliny, the Rechabites had used the same
argument, when they taught that men, the better to realize
that they were but pilgrims or exiles on earth, must neither
build houses to live in, nor plant vineyards to drink the wine
thereof, a heresy which Islam adopted and adapted cen-
turies later. It is true, of course, that the man who builds a
house to live in, and who plants a vineyard that he and his
children may drink wine, will have roots deeper in the land
of his birth or adoption than the nomad who leads or follows
his sheep where there is grass for them; but it is not true
that the nearer to Nature necessarily means the nearer to
God and to Truth: it may also mean being nearer to the
beasts of the field, but man, even when he is a beast, never
is an animal. The fate of man is not to eat that he may be
eaten; nor is it to be born and then to die, young or old, as
the case may be. There are, it is only too true, men with no
higher vision : their clay needs nothing more than water to
keep it moist. But most men are conscious of, and grateful
for, the divinely ordered purpose of their lives. Rich or poor…