Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. “To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. These small revolutions affirm the human.” Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban on booze, keeping it in their homes for visitors even if they didn't particularly take to it themselves, and bootlegging it with great brio and ingenuity. It's not a coincidence that Omar Khayyam, rebuking and ridiculing the stone-faced Iranian mullahs of his time, pointed to the value of the grape as a mockery of their joyless and sterile regime. No better form of sodality has ever been devised: at Oxford one was positively expected to take wine during tutorials. The same applies to the seder at Passover, which is obviously modeled on the Platonic symposium: questions are asked (especially of the young) while wine is circulated. The only worthwhile miracle in the New Testament-the transmutation of water into wine during the wedding at Cana-is a tribute to the persistence of Hellenism in an otherwise austere Judaea. “Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing.
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