The Sophist 2: The one about the hole in your leaking barrel

Growing up with a philosophy lecturer for a father, I was always vaguely aware of Plato, but the only bit of the ancient texts I ever actually read was a single paragraph on the two kinds of human desire. As far as I understood it, Plato reckoned that satisfying one kind of desire, the healthy one, is like pouring wine into a barrel, until the barrel is full and the job is done. But the other kind of desire causes trouble, because it’s more like a barrel with a hole in it, so you have to keep pouring and pouring and the wine just keeps leaking out of the other end. Two and a half thousand years ago, Plato suggested that nothing is ever enough for those with this sort of yearning; profligates who run around town “with an incapacity to contain one’s desires, and with the willingness to lose oneself in the ceaseless flow of pleasures.” I’ll be honest - I already knew that these ceaseless flow of pleasure types sounded quite a lot like me. So I stopped reading Plato.

Two decades later, I want to try again. Life is short and several people I know have died too young this year. I want my brain back; I want to find interesting stuff out before it’s too late and it turns out I’ve wasted my whole life on Facebook. (You know that Facebook Memories thing where it now greets you in the morning with things you posted on there nine years ago? It has chilled my blood. My longest ever relationship, and it’s with a blue box with racists in it.) I have a daughter now, and I don’t want to be thick. I want to read philosophy.

So last month I took a deep breath, went to buy some paperbacks of Ancient Greek translations, sat down, and discovered that the founding fathers of philosophy were as bad as I am. In fact they were terrible. I started with Plato’s Symposium, simply because it was the shortest book the shop had, and it turned out to be a sort of intellectual gangbang, attended purely by pissheads. In it, all of these so-called philosophers sit round discussing the state of their hangovers, and whether it’s true love they feel for the younger men they like to seduce, or just a wee bit of predatory exploitation.

"I can tell you that I'm in a really bad state from yesterday's drinking and need a rest,” says Pausanius. “I’m one of those who were thoroughly sodden yesterday,” Aristophanes agrees. The crew decide that, after the rate they’ve been carrying on, they need to "think about how to do our drinking in the most undemanding way." I mean, the whole passage was like reading my friend Jack Shankly’s Facebook threads on a Sunday night.

So I read it and then emailed my parents in a state of surprise. “Plato’s Symposium is all boozing and gay sex,” I write, “why didn’t anybody TELL me?” My mum wrote back, “Well ‘symposium’ does mean a drinking party,” and I silently fumed that my parents went to the sort of schools where you learn about drinking parties in the context of Ancient Greece, only to send me to the sort of school where you learn about drinking parties in the context of getting fingered by a boy from the year above in a skip behind the multi-storey car park.

In the Symposium, they decide to drink only for pleasure, not for competitive reasons, but I’m not sure that Britain in 2016 knows exactly what pleasure is. An older friend once advised me that her solution to drinking too much wine was to buy more expensive wine. One big glass of the posh stuff, she said, and she was sated. And it worked out costing the same, because she drank so much less.

I’ll be honest, I had no idea what she was talking about back then, because when your barrel has a hole in it, you aren’t drinking for the taste. You’re drinking for the burn at the back of your throat that comes with the taste; for the whooshing feeling that the drink is racing to get to the bottom of you. To get to the feeling that you’re the most fun person at the party, even though you find out the next day that you’re actually the person you would have asked to leave. As far as I can see, the main problem with drinking too much is that, at the time, it feels like drinking too little, which is why you carry on until you’re quite sure that you have hit the spot, by which point the spot is the world, and it has exploded all over your life.

[A quick check: do you spend your nights printing yourself out everywhere, and then wake up the next morning trying furiously to delete yourself? Do you check your phone to see what texts you sent when you still thought you were right? Mate: I’m afraid there is a hole in your barrel.]

There does come a time when you have to sit and look at that hole. It’s embarrassing. It’s mortifying. It’s fascinating. And it has love inside it too. Maybe it’s not a leak, maybe it’s an airhole, asking you to breathe through it. Maybe that stuff leaking through it wasn’t wine, but tears. Maybe you’re sad, and that sadness has got something to say which is more interesting than getting off with a kebab, even if less immediately entertaining. You do have to sit with it and let it breathe a bit. (Not the kebab.) And put some chilli sauce on it. (The kebab.) You see - I can’t even talk about love and sadness and tears without making kebab jokes. My barrel is leaking right open. Hold me.

On a practical level, though, you absolutely must learn to order a glass of water along with whatever else you’re drinking. (Yes it feels weird, but so does waking up one day and regretting the last fifteen years of your life.) Imagine that, like me, you have to face the babysitter when you get home, and it’s too embarrassing to ever do it pissed again, after that one time with the staircase and the scarf. You learn to have a couple of drinks at 8pm, peak at 9:30, and get home sober again by bedtime. It’s a dark art, but I think I’ve grasped it. Alright I'm grasping it.

Because I never again want to be Alcibiades, who turns up two hours late to the Symposium, shitfaced and shouting in the courtyard, where a flute girl is holding him up. (Just FYI, he has lengths of ivy trailing from his head.) Everybody has been taking it in turns to make a speech about love, but he feels too drunk to do his. They let him go ahead anyway, even though he’s feeling really paranoid, because of the booze, so he makes a speech about how awful Socrates is and basically accuses him of being the prototype for Nigel Farage. But he also tells Socrates that he’s “the only worthy lover” he’s ever had. It’s a right old scene. I cringe for Alcibiades, even now, just thinking of it.

It’s funny to be like that for a few years, but the ivy falls off your head and trips you over eventually. And the flute girls don’t hold you up forever - they grow up and marry somebody else. And the hole in your barrel, which has just been a little rip trying to get your attention all this time, has now turned into an ulcer.

So let’s all drink a bit less shall we.

THE END.

Illustration by the wonderful Louise Androlia, who is available for commissions: www.louiseandrolia.com