Our relationship with alcohol is a hologram for how human beings relate to the natural world. When you get to that level of brown liquor - an age distillate of a fermented thing, grain that we learned how to plant and make grow - it is in some ways the best expression of what humans are able to do. Nobody else can make that! And it's delicious.
"There's been a quantum leap technologically in our age, but unless there's another quantum leap in human relations, unless we learn to live in a new way towards one another, there will be a catastrophe."
In the highest antiquity, the people did not know that there were rulers. In the next age they loved them and praised them. In the next they feared them; in the next they despised them.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save: so much has been destroyed I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
And the maestro surely wielded the chairman's baton with extraordinary skill. His stellar record suggests that the only right answer to the age-old question of whether it is better to be lucky or good may be: both.
Alas! for that accursed time They bore thee o'er the billow, From love to titled age and crime, And an unholy pillow! From me, and from our misty clime, Where weeps the silver willow!
But say, my lord, it were not regist'red,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As 'twere retailed to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.
There are many mysteries in old age but the greatest, surely, is this: in those adverts for walk-in bathtubs, why doesn't all the water gush out when you get in?