When I was a kid my family often spent a part of the summer on an island off the coast of Maine. At the time there were only a couple of stores on this island, the most interesting of which was an old-fashioned malt shop: the kind with red-leather swivel stools, a long Formica counter, a spring-set screen door, and a wooden floor that creaked in a friendly, familiar way when you walked in.
My parents had an account at this store, and just about every afternoon I’d come in and charge a vanilla milkshake – or, in the high-sounding language the owner of the shop used for it, a frappe.
In the early seventies people didn’t tend to emphasize the importance of drinking water regularly the way they do now. I steered clear of the stuff myself by and large, and a thousand-calorie mix of whole milk, ice cream, and vanilla syrup seemed like as good a way of reviving myself after a long hot day as any.
Everything about these frappes, from the tapered, trophy-like glass they came in, to the silver canister that held the inevitable extra blob or two of ice cream, to the fact that, magically, no money was necessary to buy them, seemed custom designed to elevate them above the ordinary run of food-and-drink items in my life. But the most important thing about them was the way they tasted. White, cold, and good in a way that was more than simply good, they gave me my first experience of the fact that some drinks are so elementally satisfying they aren’t JUST drinks at all. They’re something more.
Coincidentally enough, my next experience with a drink that was more than just a drink was once again on that same idyllic island. This time around I was eighteen years old, had been away from the place for a number of years, and the beverage in question was a bottle of beer. Heineken, to be exact. It was the end of a long, pleasant August day (I was enjoying being back among all my childhood memories even more than I’d expected), and I was standing on the porch of a big seaside house with a bunch of other islanders, watching the sun go down. It was a warm, windy afternoon, and behind the pleasant babble of voices around me I could hear the wind rising and falling as it streamed through the big oaks surrounding the house. I was having such a good time that, until someone handed me that bottle, it hadn’t even occurred to me that I was thirsty.
But I was – so much so that in a moment I’d drunk half the bottle. This wasn’t the first beer I ever drank, but it was the first one I ever really NOTICED: The first one that was satisfying in the same kind of urgent, weirdly essential way that those vanilla frappes had been. The instant the alcohol hit my stomach I suddenly became conscious of myself, and of the happiness I was feeling at that moment, in a new and larger way. It was almost like I could FEEL that happiness in the air around me. By taking that drink I’d quenched my physical thirst, but I’d also quenched something more.
“As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” I was 33, and sober for a few months, when I came across this passage from Psalms. It was quoted by Lewis Hyde, in an article called “Alcohol and Poetry: John Berryman and the Booze Talking.” In the piece, Hyde made what was, to me at the time, a new observation: At the center of alcoholism was thirst. Not thirst for liquor, however, but something larger than liquor: A state of satisfaction so fundamental, so absolute, that all other forms of human longing, from the most base to the most rarefied, were really only disguised versions of it.
From the Bible to the Vedas of ancient India to Islamic mystical poetry, thirst shows up everywhere in the world’s religious and devotional literature. Some of this material – like that passage from Psalms quoted above – focuses on thirst for water (what I like to think of as Thirst Number One). Elsewhere, it is alcohol (more often than not, wine) and the ecstasies of inebriation that is focused on – that is, Thirst Number Two. In his famous poem “The Tavern,” the Sufi mystical poet Rumi imagined the entire world of physical existence as a bar crowded with reeling, boisterous revelers too drunk to leave.
Who looks out with my eyes? What is the soul?
I cannot stop asking.
If I could taste one sip of an answer,
I could break out of this prison for drunks.
I didn't come here of my own accord, and I can't leave that way.
Whoever brought me here will have to take me home.
(Translator: Coleman Barks. From The Essential Rumi)
This kind of literature can get pretty earthy. But no matter how literal it seems sometimes, all the talk of water or wine is ultimately not about Thirst Number one or Thirst Number Two at all, but Thirst Number Three. The thirst Carl Jung was talking about in his letter to Bill Wilson when he wrote that the craving for alcohol “is the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.”
Yes! The body shouts to us when we are thirsty and take a drink. This is what I was missing. This is what I was looking for. And in that feeling of satisfaction, we get a hint of that larger satisfaction that only connection with something infinitely larger than either water or wine can provide. A hint of what all thirst is really for.