The best books are those that tell you what you already know, but didn’t know that you knew.
If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent much of your life trying to make sense of things: happiness and suffering, love and loss, reason and emotion, the strange business of being human.
That search has taken me through medicine, psychiatry, philosophy, literature, history, and the wisdom of the ancient world.
Along the way, I’ve written books that bring these different traditions into conversation—not for the sake of scholarship alone, but to shed light on the enduring questions of how to think, how to feel, and how to live.
These are not books written to impress or overwhelm. They are written to illuminate: to challenge familiar assumptions, reveal unexpected connections, and offer new ways of understanding ourselves and the world.
My hope is that, when you finish one of them, you’ll never quite see the world in the same way again.
Here on my website you’ll find not only books and essays, but ways of understanding yourself and the world a little more clearly.
Who am I? This is perhaps the oldest and deepest question in philosophy. More than two and a half thousand years ago, the sages of the Upanishads rose up to it. Their meditation, often conveyed obliquely in the form of stories, remains one of the most striking and illuminating in the history of human thought.
The Story of Indra
In the Chandogya Upanishad (c. 7th century BCE), Indra, king of the Vedic gods, and his nemesis, Virochana, king of the asuras (anti-gods), go to the ashram of the creator god, Prajapati, to learn the secret of Atman (the Self).
Prajapati takes them both in, and, after 32 years, summons them and tells them that Atman is the reflection of the self in the pupil of the eye. Satisfied with this answer, Virochana returns to the asuras, who take to venerating the bodily self.
But Indra is not so sure, and goes back to the ashram. After 32 more years as a brahmacharya (celibate student), Prajapati tells Indra that Atman is the dream self.
Still full of doubt, Indra is made to wait another 32 years, before being told that Atman is the unconscious self.
When Indra protests that no good can come of this knowledge, Prajapati keeps him for five more years and, after a total of 101 years, finally tells him the secret of Atman.
If Atman is neither the waking self, nor the dreaming self, nor the sleeping self, then what is Atman?
By having Indra wait for what is the natural lifespan of a wise person, Prajapati is making the point that the deepest truths cannot simply be taught, but must painstakingly be learnt. Wisdom is not something that can simply be handed over. It demands patience, perseverance, and, above all, the willingness to question even the answers one has already received. Virochana was content with appearances; Indra sought the truth behind them.
The Upanishads return to this mystery again and again. In one Upanishad, Indra spends a lifetime seeking the Self. In another, the same mystery is pursued by a very different seeker.
The Story of Nachiketa
The brahmin (priest) Vajashravasa purports to be sacrificing everything he owns, but his son Nachiketa notices that he is only offering up those cows that are old, lame, or otherwise unproductive.
Nachiketa repeatedly taunts his father, saying, “I too am yours! To which god will you offer me?” In a fit of rage, Vajashravasa cries out, “To Yama himself!”
Taking his father at his word, Nachiketa descends to Yama’s abode. But the god of death is out, and the boy is made to wait for three days without food or water. When Yama returns, he offers the brahmin boy three boons to atone for his lack of hospitality.
For the first boon, Nachiketa asks for peace between himself and his father when he is returned to the old man. Yama happily grants this.
For the second boon, he asks to learn the fire sacrifice, which he performs to Yama’s satisfaction.
Finally, for the third boon, he asks to be told what comes after death.
Yama replies:
Here, even the gods of yore had doubt. Indeed it is not easy to know—subtle is this matter—O Nachiketa, ask for some other boon. Press not this on me; give this up for me… Ask for centenarian sons and grandsons, many cattle, elephants, gold and horses. Ask for wide extent of earth and live yourself, as many autumns as you like.
But Nachiketa resists the riches of the world, saying that man is not to be satisfied with wealth: “If wealth were wanted, we shall get it, if we only see thee.”
Impressed by the boy, Yama agrees to tell him the Secret of the Self, which persists beyond the death of the body.
After a time, Nachiketa bids farewell to Yama and returns to his father as a jivanmukta, that is, one who has achieved moksha (liberation) in this life.
Whereas Indra’s trial was patience, Nachiketa’s was temptation. Both the god and the boy proved themselves worthy of the knowledge they sought.
The Secret of the Self
One seeker waited 101 years. Another contended with Death himself. Both sought the same truth.
What did Yama tell Nachiketa? And what, in the Chandogya Upanishad, did Prajapati finally tell Indra?
“Atman” is often translated into English as “soul” but does not include the individual or cognitive aspects of the Judeo-Christian soul and, for this reason, is better translated as “Self.”
In Hindu thought, the individual aspects of the Judeo-Christian soul, such as ego, mind, reason, emotion, and desire, are subsumed under the jivanatman (“life-breath”), or jiva for short.
Whereas the jiva, the personal self, is enmeshed in the world, the Atman is detached from this contingent life and incarnation. And whereas the jiva is ever-changing and evolving, the Atman, the universal Self, is steadfast and immoveable.
In the Shvetashvatara Upanishad, the jiva and Atman are compared to two inseparable birds sitting in a tree (the body). One bird, the jiva, gorges on the sweet and bitter fruits of the tree, while the other, tasting of neither, calmly looks on.
The Atman is neither the waking self, nor the dreaming self, nor the sleeping self, as Indra had been led to believe, but pure consciousness, or witness-consciousness, and of a kind with the supreme soul, Paramatman, which is either Brahman or an aspect of Brahman.
There is something within us that witnesses every thought without itself becoming a thought, every emotion without itself becoming an emotion. Our bodies change, our memories fade, our personalities evolve, yet the simple fact of awareness remains. The sages of the Upanishads identified this silent witness with the Atman.
In all living things, Atman is the spark of life, or light of consciousness, that ignites and illumines all else for the time that it remains embodied. It is the eternal core of a living being, which, in death, leaves it for another form, or, at long last, returns to the infinity of Brahman.
If the Self, the Atman, is made of the same stuff as the world, then self-understanding and self-control become means of understanding and controlling the world and existing on a higher plane.
In the Katha Upanishad, Yama tells Nachiketa:
Subtler than the subtle, greater than the great, in the heart of each living being, the Atman reposes. One free from desire, with his mind and the senses composed, sees the glory of the Atman and becomes absolved from grief.
Knowledge of the Self can be attained through the practice of yoga, which Yama defines for Nachiketa as ‘the firm holding back of the senses’.
This is the first recorded mention of ‘yoga’ in something close to its modern sense—and it is put into the mouth of Death himself.
Yama warns Nachiketa to be watchful, ‘for yoga comes and goes.’
More than twenty-five centuries later, the question that drew both Indra and Nachiketa remains our own. We spend much of our lives identifying ourselves with our bodies, our ambitions, our possessions, our memories, even our thoughts. The Upanishads invite us to look deeper. Beneath everything that changes, they suggest, lies something that does not: the silent witness, the Self, which is not merely ours but one with the universe.
Whether one accepts this vision or not, it remains one of humanity’s most beautiful and profound meditations on the oldest of all philosophical questions:
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Recognition, memory, and the need to find our way home.
Outside the palace gates lies an old, flea-ridden and forgotten dog.
His name is Argos. Once he had been the finest hunting dog in Ithaca, swift enough to pursue deer and wild goats across the hills. Now he lies upon a dung heap. His master has been away for twenty years. The servants neglect him. The household scarcely notices that he is still alive.
A beggar approaches the palace. No one recognises him. Not the servants who pass him by. Not the arrogant suitors who have consumed his wealth and overrun his home. Not even Penelope, though she has faithfully waited for him. Athena has disguised Odysseus as an old man, stooped and ragged, so that he may enter his own house without revealing himself.
But Argos knows. Though he cannot rise to greet his master, he pricks up his ears and wags his tail. Odysseus in his disguise can do no more than turn away and brush a tear from his eye. Then Argos dies.
The entire episode occupies barely forty lines of the Odyssey. Remove it, and the plot remains untouched—except that we have deprived the Odyssey of one of its most tender and memorable scenes.
Anyone who has loved a dog can immediately relate. Dogs care little for our achievements, our reputation, or our wealth. They remain indifferent to almost everything that preoccupies human beings, honour and disgrace, youth and old age.
But there is something deeper here than affection for animals. The irony is almost unbearable. Argos is the first creature in Ithaca to recognise Odysseus. The man who has outwitted the Cyclops, escaped the Sirens, and survived shipwreck after shipwreck at last returns to his home only to discover that he has become a stranger. His disguise deceives those who knew and loved him as much as those who seek to destroy him. Only the dying dog sees through it.
It is one of the great recognitions in literature. Aristotle, writing centuries later, would identify recognition—anagnorisis—as one of the central devices of tragedy. In the Poetics, he distinguishes several kinds of anagnorisis. He regards the finest as that which arises naturally from the action itself, transforming both the protagonist’s understanding and his emotions, as when Oedipus finds out who he is—his father’s son, and murderer.
The Odyssey contains many such moments: the old nurse Eurycleia recognising Odysseus by the scar on his thigh, Penelope recognising him only after he reveals the secret of their marriage bed, Laertes recognising him only after he names and numbers the trees in the orchard. Yet, the first recognition belongs not to a nurse, wife, or father. It belongs to a dog.
Recognition
Recognition is one of the deepest human needs. Long before we seek fame and deeds, we seek to be known. An infant turns instinctively towards a familiar face. Friends delight in being understood without explanation. Lovers hope to be recognised beneath the depredations of time. One of the quietest forms of suffering is not to be hated but to be neglected, to become as if invisible.
Perhaps this is why Argos touches us so. His recognition is utterly disinterested. His body is broken. His life is at its end. He wants nothing from Odysseus.
Recognition begins in remembrance. ‘To recognise’ (Latin, recognoscere) means ‘to know again’. To recognise someone is to perceive beneath altered appearances the enduring existence of a person.
That is precisely what everyone else fails to do. The disguise woven by Athena is only the outward expression of a truth that Homer understands deeply. Twenty years change us all. Time alters our faces, our bodies, our fortunes, our place in the world. We acquire disappointments, infirmities, and disguises of our own. We become parents, widows, strangers, exiles, successes, failures. Sometimes we scarcely recognise ourselves, and shun mirrors.
But still we remain the same person.
Recognition is the gift of seeing through the disguise.
Dogs do not recognise us in quite the way that we recognise one another. They know scent, voice, movement, presence. They recognise by sense rather than conscious reflection. Homer seems to suggest that there is a form of knowledge more primitive and more faithful than reason itself. For love sees what intelligence cannot.
Perhaps that is why Odysseus weeps. The tears are as much for Argos as they are for himself. For twenty years he has survived by becoming someone else. He has lied, concealed, disguised, adapted, endured. He has been warrior, sailor, beggar, castaway, prisoner, lover, storyteller. Then, for a brief moment, before he reclaims his kingdom, someone sees the man beneath all these transformations.
Home, perhaps, is not merely the place we come from. It is the place where we are recognised.
The Excellence of Dogs and Men
There is another reason we weep for Argos.
Argos has spent his whole life waiting. Day after day he has lain outside the palace, decaying along with Ithaca itself. His master never returned. His strength failed. The household neglected him. Fleas bred upon him. At last, he came to rest upon a dung heap, discarded as completely as the old order that Odysseus left behind. Yet he never ceased to belong to someone.
The Greeks had a word for excellence: aretē. We usually translate it as ‘virtue’, but it means something richer: the fulfilment of a thing’s nature, the attainment of its excellence. The excellence of a knife is to cut well. The excellence of a horse is to run well. Human excellence is a matter for philosophers. But the excellence of a dog is simpler.
To remain faithful.
To remember.
To recognise.
The ancient Indians, too, chose a dog to embody this virtue. At the end of the Mahabharata, after the great war has been fought and every earthly ambition broken, the Pandava brothers journey to Mount Meru, followed only by a stray dog. One by one, they fall on the ascent, leaving only the eldest, King Yudhisthira, to arrive at the gates of heaven. Indra invites Yudhisthira into heaven, but refuses to admit the dog. Yudhisthira turns away, explaining that he cannot bring himself to abandon his faithful companion. At this, the dog reveals himself as none other than Dharma (cosmic order, duty, the right way of living).
Separated by thousands of miles and many centuries, Homer and the authors of the Mahabharata arrived at the same intuition: the fidelity of a dog is not merely an animal instinct. It is a revelation.
The Memory of Civilisations
Why should such a small scene—Argos recognising Odysseus—bear so much weight?
Memory is not merely a faculty of mind. It is the thread from which identity is woven. We are the stories we can still tell. To lose a memory is not simply to lose information. It is to lose ourselves.
The Romans understood this as well as the Greeks. ‘To be ignorant of the past’ wrote Cicero, ‘is to be forever a child.’ ‘For what is the time of man, lest it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?’
The past is not the antithesis of progress, but the condition that makes progress possible. We become fully human not by beginning anew with every generation, but by entering a conversation that began long before we arrived.
That conversation is what we call civilisation, and it is at the bottom of who we are.
Long before history was written in books, it was preserved in stories. Homer did not simply entertain the Greeks. He taught them who they were, and, therefore, who they should be. His epics carried the memory of a people: their heroes, their gods, their fears, their longings, their understanding of honour, justice, courage, hospitality, and home. Socrates often began a debate with a Homeric commonplace. Aristotle gave Alexander a copy of the Iliad, which he carried with him into India. Homer became something much more than the greatest poet of the Greeks: he became their memory.
Nor was Greece unique. Every great civilisation possesses such works. For India, the Mahabharata and Ramayana met the same need, preserving not merely stories but an entire cosmology, psychology, and philosophy. Their verses, like those of the Iliad and Odyssey, were recited, interpreted, and debated for centuries. They became less books than living conversations, renewed by each generation that inherited them.
The Romans, in turn, revered the mos maiorum, the custom of the ancestors. They believed that the living owed a debt of remembrance to the dead. In guarding the sacred flame of Rome, the Vestal Virgins guarded something more than fire. They guarded continuity itself. A civilisation survives not because its monuments endure, but because its memory does—because the thread is never cut, the flame never extinguished, and the story never forgotten.
If the Renaissance was a rebirth, it was because Europeans suddenly regained their memory. Petrarch searched monastic libraries for forgotten manuscripts. Humanists copied ancient texts by hand. After centuries of oblivion, Plato, Cicero, and Lucretius returned to the conversation. Civilisation advanced not by burying the past, but by recovering it.
Today, we imagine progress rather differently. We celebrate novelty, innovation, and disruption. We have access to more information than any generation that went before, but so little memory that we have forgotten that civilisation is built by looking backwards as well as forwards.
Information accumulates facts. Memory accumulates substance and meaning. Perhaps this is why ancient stories continue to matter. They remind us that we are heirs before we are innovators.
None of us begins from nothing. We inherit a language we did not invent, customs we did not create, ideas we did not discover, institutions we did not build, stories we did not write. Even when we reject our inheritance, as Plato rejected Homer from his ideal city, we do so in conversation with it.
That’s why I’ve devoted so much of my work to the great currents of the past. Not because the past deserves our reverence, but because it illuminates who we are and who we might yet become.
Are We Better Than Dogs?
In Game of Thrones, Archmaester Ebrose tells a young Samwell Tarly:
‘In the Citadel, we lead different lives for different reasons. We are this world’s memory, Samwell Tarly. Without us, men would be little better than dogs.’
Later, during a war council, Bran Stark explains why the Night King seeks to destroy him. As the Three-Eyed Raven, Bran embodies the collective memory of mankind. ‘He wants to erase this world. And I am its memory.’
Samwell understands immediately: ‘That’s what death is, isn’t it? Forgetting, being forgotten. People forget where we’ve been and what we’ve done, we’re not men anymore, just animals…’
The idea is as old as civilisation itself. Without remembrance, we lose not only our past but ourselves.
Yet Homer quietly complicates the comparison. For the old dog remembers, even when no one else does.
Perhaps this is why Argos so touches us after nearly three thousand years. He reminds us that memory is not simply the recollection of facts. It is fidelity—to a person, a place, a people, a civilisation. It is the refusal to allow time, absence, or death to sever the bonds that make us who we are.
When Odysseus finally returns home, the first to recognise him is not his son, his queen, or even his father.
It is an old dog lying upon a heap of dung.
He pricks up his ears.
He wags his tail.
He remembers.
Are we better than dogs?
Continue Exploring
In The Meaning of Myth, I explore how myths preserve the memory of civilisations—and why they remain indispensable to understanding ourselves.
Odysseus, Homer, and the Story That Shaped the Western Imagination
Arnold Böcklin, Odysseus and Calypso (1883). Offered eternity, Odysseus chooses home.
‘Tell me, Muse, of the man of many twists and turns…’ Few openings in literature are more famous—or revealing. The Greek is simpler still: andra, ‘the man’. Not the warrior, nor the king, nor the conqueror. Simply the man. It is an extraordinary way to begin. Homer could have sung of the Wooden Horse, the sack of Troy, or the countless heroes who fought and fell beneath its walls. His earlier epic, the Iliad, opens on overpowering passion: ‘Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles…’ One poem begins with wrath; the other with a person. One asks how a hero should fight and die; the other how a human being should live. Perhaps that is why, after nearly three thousand years, the Odyssey still feels so astonishingly alive.
Homer himself never seems to tire of Odysseus. He gives him more epithets than any other character: ‘the man of many sorrows’ (polypenthes), ‘the man of many devices’ (polymetis), ‘the man of many twists and turns’ (polytropos), and a score more. No single description suffices. Odysseus is king and sailor, warrior and diplomat, husband and father, beggar and storyteller, trickster and survivor. The first epithet Homer picks out for him, polytropos, has defeated generations of eminent translators. It has been rendered, among others, as ‘much-wandering’, ‘complicated’, ‘resourceful’, ‘versatile’, and ‘of many twists and turns’. All capture something of Homer’s meaning, but none exhaust it. Whereas Achilles burns with a single, blinding excellence, Odysseus is of many parts. He changes with circumstance without ceasing to be himself.
Nowhere is this more delightfully illustrated than in the adventure with the Cyclops. Trapped inside the cave of Polyphemus, with no hope of overcoming the giant by force, Odysseus reaches for his greatest weapon: not his sword, but his wits. When asked his name, he replies, ‘Nobody.’ It is one of the oldest jokes in literature, and has scarcely aged. When the blinded Cyclops bellows that ‘Nobody’ has attacked him, his neighbours abandon him to his fate. Yet there are hidden depths to the comedy. Although Homer gives Odysseus more names than anyone else, the man’s greatest triumph comes from altogether surrendering his name. He survives by becoming Nobody. Only when his ship has safely put out to sea does he make the mistake of shouting his true name back across the waves. For one irresistible moment, the old heroic code reasserts itself—inviting Poseidon’s vengeance and prolonging the homeward journey by ten more years.
Here, perhaps, we arrive at the deepest difference between Homer’s two great heroes. Achilles is the supreme warrior, swift-footed and godlike, the embodiment of an aristocratic world in which honour is won on the battlefield and a glorious death is preferable to an obscure life. Faced with the choice between longevity and everlasting fame, he chooses fame without hesitation. Odysseus belongs to the same heroic age, yet already points beyond it. He fights not to die gloriously, but to live. His greatest victories are won not by brute strength but slippery guile. A civilisation founded upon Achilles would always risk being at war. A civilisation founded upon Odysseus might one day know peace and prosperity.
Again and again, Homer shows us what Odysseus longs for. Not glory. Not pleasure. Not even immortality. Home. When Calypso offers him eternal youth and everlasting life, he refuses. He knows that Penelope has grown older during his absence, and that she cannot offer him the eternal youth of an immortal goddess. Yet he pines for her all the same. He longs for Telemachus, for the columns of smoke rising above Ithaca, for the domestic life he left behind. Homer gives us one unforgettable image of the meaning of home. When Penelope, still testing the stranger before her, orders a servant to move their marriage bed, Odysseus protests that the bed cannot be displaced. For it was he who, long ago, fashioned it around the living trunk of an olive tree. Home, Homer suggests, is something like that, something living and deeply rooted, something that binds and shapes us. If Achilles seeks to transcend the human condition, Odysseus embraces it.
Perhaps that is why we feel so close to him. Homer never presents Odysseus as an invulnerable hero. He is brave, but he is also afraid; ingenious, yet capable of foolishness; resilient, yet often overwhelmed by grief. Indeed, the first time we meet him he is not fighting monsters but sitting alone on Calypso’s island, gazing across the sea towards Ithaca. Later he weeps again as the bard Demodocus sings of Troy, unable to hear his own story without reliving its pain. Homer never hides his hero’s tears, because he understands that strength and sorrow are not opposites but companions.
Perhaps this is also why Homer has a soft spot for him. We might admire Achilles, but we love Odysseus. Achilles may dazzle us, but he would also kill and dismember us, whereas Odysseus would sit down and tell us a story. Homer delights in his resourcefulness—which is, of course, a reflection of his own—but lingers just as tenderly over the moments of recognition that punctuate the poem. None is more moving than the meeting with Argos. Twenty years have passed since Odysseus sailed for Troy. The old hunting dog now lies neglected on a dung heap outside the palace, blind, flea-ridden, and too weak to stand. Yet as Odysseus approaches, disguised as a beggar, Argos lifts his head. He knows. His tail gives a final wag. Then he dies. Odysseus cannot embrace him. To reveal himself would be to risk everything. He can only turn away and brush a tear from his cheek.
We think of Odysseus as one of Homer’s two great heroes. Yet, he scarcely resembles the archetypal hero of myth. Lord Raglan famously identified twenty-two recurring features of mythical and legendary heroes, among them a miraculous birth, an attempt on the infant’s life, royal destiny, victory over monsters, a mysterious or sacrificial death… Figures such as Moses and Oedipus satisfy most of these criteria. Odysseus fulfils only eight. By the standards of comparative mythology, the greatest hero in Western literature turns out to be strangely incomplete. Which is, of course, precisely the point. He is no miracle child, no predestined saviour, no invulnerable demigod. He is simply a man—of exceptional intelligence and resilience, certainly, but recognisably human throughout.
For all its monsters, enchantresses, storms, and marvels, the Odyssey is not ultimately a poem about adventure. It is a poem about home: about memory, fidelity, identity, and belonging. Odysseus does not journey merely to recover his kingdom. He journeys to recover himself. This is why the Odyssey still speaks to us.
Or perhaps that is only part of the explanation. For many tales have been told of exile and homecoming. Many heroes have endured suffering, temptation, and loss. This raises another question. Why did this particular story become one of the foundational stories by which an entire civilisation came to understand itself?
The answer cannot simply be that the Odyssey is a great poem. Great stories abound. Homer became much more than a great storyteller. He became the educator of Greece. Long before Socrates knocked about, generations of Greeks had learnt from Homer what courage looked like, what honour demanded, what it meant to be a husband, a father, a king, a host, a guest—even what it meant to be human. His poems furnished the imaginative material from which philosophy itself would arise.
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates often begins an investigation with a Homeric commonplace. Plato himself repeatedly challenged Homer, even proposing, in the Republic, to banish poets (meaning mainly Homer, Hesiod, and Simonides) from his ideal city. Yet, Plato quotes Homer so frequently that he seems unable to think without him. Even as he seeks to supplant Homer as Greece’s teacher, he continues to converse with him. Aristotle is more admiring, praising Homer as the unsurpassed master of epic poetry. The three greatest philosophers of antiquity differed profoundly in temperament and outlook. Yet all three remained rooted in Homer, each responding to him in his own way.
That is what distinguishes a foundational story from a work of literature, however great it might be. It does not merely entertain or even inspire. It furnishes the imaginative world within which a civilisation comes to understand itself. Successive generations may react to it, reinterpret it, or seek, like Plato, to transcend it—but always from within it.
Every civilisation seems to possess one or two such treasures. India has the Mahabharata, Persia, the Shahnameh, the Hebrew world, the stories of the Bible. Remarkably few people, though they may keep a copy, read these vast works from cover to cover. Many Europeans and Americans who revere Homer have never read the Iliad or Odyssey, just as many Indians, though familiar with the Pandava brothers, have never pored over the hundred thousand verses of the Mahabharata. We do not choose these stories any more than we choose our native language. We inherit them. They become part of our mental landscape, furnishing our images, our ideals, and our sense of what it means to be brave, faithful, cunning, or wise.
They are as the sacred fire tended by the Vestal Virgins in ancient Rome: seldom approached, yet somehow reassuring simply because it continues to burn. Quietly, they illuminate the language, values, and images through which successive generations come to understand themselves. Because they are so rich, they are never exhausted. Each age returns to them with new questions and finds new answers.
The history of the Odyssey is, in part, a history of these returns. James Joyce transformed Odysseus into Leopold Bloom, erring not across the wine-dark sea but through the sooty streets of Dublin. Derek Walcott carried the Odyssey to the Caribbean, discovering in it a language for exile, colonialism, and homecoming.
The Odyssey is an ancient poem about one man’s journey home. Perhaps that is why we have never stopped returning to it.
Continue Exploring
If this essay has left you wondering why certain stories continue to speak across centuries, you may enjoy The Meaning of Myth—an exploration of how myths become enduring sources of meaning, shaping not only our imagination but the civilisations we inherit.
The Symposium by Anselm Feuerbach (1869). In ancient Greece, wine was not merely consumed; it created a space for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy.
Wine is in decline.
Across much of the world, especially among younger generations, people are drinking less wine than they once did. The reasons are several: changing attitudes to alcohol, concerns about health, economic pressures, changing patterns of socialising, and shifting cultural values.
Perhaps this is no great loss. If wine is merely alcohol, then one drink can be replaced by another.
But wine has never been merely alcohol. For thousands of years, wine has occupied a remarkable place in culture and civilisation. It has flowed through religion and ritual, philosophy and poetry, friendship and celebration.
The deeper question, then, is not why people drink wine, or are drinking less of it, but why wine has mattered so much to human beings.
Human beings have always sought ways to turn necessity into meaning. We do not merely eat; we dine. We do not merely speak; we tell stories. We do not merely gather; we celebrate. We do not merely see; we behold. We do not merely survive; we live.
Wine is one of the oldest ways in which we transform ordinary experience into something more elevated. It takes grapes, sunlight, soil, and time, and turns them into something capable of carrying memory, place, history, and human intention.
Wine is nature transformed into culture.
Wine lovers know that wine is so much more than a drink. But how are we to explain this to those who do not already know it?
When you uncork a bottle of mature fine wine, what you are drinking is the product of a particular culture and tradition, a particular soil and exposure, a particular climate, the weather in that year, and the love, labour, and lives of people who may now be no more. If you know how to read it, the wine, like a book, will speak to you of all those things and more.
The wine is still alive, still evolving, so much so that no two bottles can ever be quite the same. By now, the stuff has become incredibly complex, almost ethereal. Without seeking to blaspheme, it has become something like the smell and taste of God.
This moving mirror. This distillate of time and place. It will send shivers down your spine. It will make you burst into laughter and tears. It will knock you right out of yourself, release you from the abstract and self-absorbed prison of the mind, and redeliver you into the magic and mystery of the world as though you had just been reborn.
Every wine that can do this does it in its own way, so that there can be no end to your journey. At its best, wine returns us to the world: more alive, more embodied, and more at home in it.
To get the most out of wine, you will need to sharpen your senses, and you will need to deepen your knowledge. Through wine, we become more aware of our senses and begin to develop them, especially the neglected, almost vestigial, senses of smell and taste. By awakening our faculties, we begin to experience the world more intensely. We also begin to experience it in a different way, as though we were a different kind of animal. We become more instinctual—until, like Nietzsche, we can declare:
My genius is in my nostrils.
Modern life encourages us to live as detached minds moving through an abstract world. Wine returns us to our senses. We are embodied creatures, creatures of sensation and perception, rooted in place and time.
Through wine, I have learnt a great deal about geography, geology, meteorology, biology, agriculture, chemistry, gastronomy, art, history, languages, literature, psychology, philosophy, and religion. Through wine, I have communed with many parts of the world—and visited many of them too. Wine regions, with their gardened slopes and Goldilocks climates, are among the most agreeable destinations imaginable.
Blind tasting has sped up my development. It has also taught me about the methods of the mind and, in the process, made me less bigoted and less dogmatic.
On so many levels, wine offers both a motivation and a medium through which to apprehend the world. It is, ultimately, a kind of homecoming, a way of feeling at home in the world.
A dinner without wine may still be a perfectly serviceable dinner, but for me—and, I suspect, for many wine lovers—it feels somehow incomplete. To put a bottle onto the table is to offer more than a drink. It is to invite conversation, companionship, and the possibility of transforming the quotidian and utilitarian into something more.
Without it, something intangible is missing: the transition from eating to dining, from nourishment to pleasure, from company to companionship, from the practical to the contemplative, from the necessary to the meaningful.
Wine brings people together, not merely to drink, but to converse, create, and celebrate. The Greeks understood this well. In the symposium, wine was not consumed merely for intoxication. It formed part of a carefully cultivated social and intellectual ritual. Friends gathered to eat, drink, debate, sing, and explore ideas. The word symposium itself means ‘drinking together’.
The drinking may have been the pretext, but not the true purpose—and in the most immortal of all symposia, that of Plato, the guests make a point of moderating their intake. Wine created the conditions for conversation, friendship, poetry, and philosophy. It loosened the mind without clouding it. It allowed people to step outside their ordinary roles and encounter one another in a different way.
The Romans continued this tradition in their convivia, gatherings in which food, wine, and conversation became an art. For many centuries, wine occupied this place in human life: not as an escape from civilisation, but as one of its highest expressions.
Yet wine has always possessed another, more mysterious dimension. It has not only helped to shape civilisation, but also reminded us that civilisation cannot be everything. The Greeks expressed this through Dionysus, the god of wine, regeneration, theatre, religious ecstasy, and ritual madness. Dionysus embodied something that every civilisation must somehow accommodate: the human need to loosen the boundaries of the self, to escape from rigid identities, and to experience a larger reality.
Wine played a central role in the Dionysian Mysteries, which aimed above all at ecstatic union with the divine—an idea that has survived to this day in the sacramental blood of Christ. The Dionysian impulse stood in tension with the Apollonian order and restraint imposed by society.
Civilisation depends upon both: the impulse to create form and the impulse to dissolve it. Without form, there is chaos; without dissolution, there is stagnation. This is why wine has always stood between refinement and abandon, cultivation and dissolution. Blind tasting, with its emphasis on reason and deduction, is an attempt to marry these forces. It requires intuition and imagination, but also discipline and analysis.
In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche recognised the Dionysian impulse as a primal and universal force:
Either through the influence of narcotic drink, of which all primitive men and peoples speak, or through the powerful coming on of spring … that Dionysian excitement arises. As its power increases, the subjective fades into complete forgetfulness of self. In the German Middle Ages under the same power of Dionysus constantly growing hordes waltzed from place to place, singing and dancing. In that St. John’s and St. Vitus’s dancing we recognize the Bacchic chorus of the Greeks once again, and its precursors in Asia Minor, right back to Babylon and the orgiastic Sacaea.
‘Ecstasy’ literally means ‘to stand outside oneself’. Modern life, with its relentless emphasis on the sovereign self, has made such moments increasingly rare. More than ever before, we are encouraged to construct, defend, and project our individual identities. From a young age, we are taught to remain in tight control of our ego or persona, with the aim of projecting it as far out as possible. As a result, we may have lost the art of letting go, leading to a poverty or monotony of conscious experience. Yet there are times when the surest way of finding ourselves is, paradoxically, to lose ourselves.
Letting go can threaten the life that we have built and even the person that we have become. But it can also free us from our modern narrowness and neediness, and deliver—or re-deliver—us into a bigger and brighter world.
Wine matters not because it is unique, but because it reveals something universal. It represents something deeply human: our desire to transform necessity into meaning, and to experience life more fully and authentically.
A grape becomes wine. A meal becomes a celebration. Company becomes companionship. A moment becomes a memory. Necessity becomes meaning.
Perhaps what we risk losing is not merely wine, but one of humanity’s oldest reminders that life is not only something to endure, preserve, or prolong.
It is something to experience, savour, and celebrate—something that returns us to the world with our senses awake, our minds open, and our place within it restored.
‘Man,’ said Balzac, ‘dies in despair, while the spirit dies in ecstasy.’
Discover the world of wine
In The Concise Guide to Wine and Blind Tasting, Neel Burton offers an engaging introduction to the art, science, and meaning of wine. Going beyond grape varieties and tasting notes, the book explores how wine connects nature, culture, history, and human perception.
Whether you are a complete beginner or a seasoned enthusiast, you will learn how to taste wine with greater confidence, understand what makes different wines distinctive, and develop the skills of blind tasting. Along the way, you will discover why wine has occupied such a unique place in human civilisation—for wine is not merely something we drink, but something we experience, interpret, and share.
A guide to becoming not just a better wine taster, but a more attentive observer of the world.
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