“How to Be Intoxicated”

This article is annoyingly coy (it’s all “there’s danger in intoxication! there are no guarantees!” but it’s scared to say what that actually looks like) but the basic idea is right on and important. And if you want specifics there’s always The Secret History so I guess somebody’s already written the stuff he leaves out:

…When colleges pick the one book that every new student should read (as they increasingly do through required summer reading programs), they tend to choose something of the recent-social-ills variety. One study found that 97 percent of those common readings come from 1990 or later. There’s value, certainly, in many of those choices. But colleges should consider the value in The Bacchae, something much older and, in its way, much more uncomfortable. Euripides’ play still matters after some 2,500 years because it is the product of a culture and a poet who were far better than we are at imagining themselves into a time when drunkenness was new. There’s a refusal in this play to take intoxication for granted. There is an insistence, instead, on seeing it as literally awesome—wonderful and frightening—in a way that seems to join our own adolescence and the far-off adolescence of our culture.

more (via Walter Olson)