Book Review: "The Philosophy of Wine," by Béla Hamvas
Some discussion on the Hungarian prayer book for atheists
I. Intro
One of my regular hobbyhorses on this blog is the importance of the various forms of communication, like signs, signals, works of art, other contrivances, aspects of nature, and forms of physical self-expression that are not primarily directed toward the intellective faculties. Communication, in other words, that isn’t reducible to language and thus expresses itself non-discursively, through the most direct possible kind of sense-apprehension. And the two least intellective senses that humans possess are those of smell and taste, since no language could ever be communicated through them. When something is communicated through those senses, there is no complete thought being expressed, nor could there be, and thus speaking or writing about the sensation becomes a bit of a challenge. There’s no way to translate the sensation directly into words. But that is also why this kind of communication is so valuable. It’s a kind of communication that keeps us mindful of the earth around us; it keeps us attuned to ourselves as embodied entities within a physical universe, not as free-floating atoms or beings of pure discourse. A poet that draws our focus chiefly toward philosophical notions and political concepts is failing in his role as poet. A poet who can impel us to recall a certain scent, or a certain flavor lodged deep within our memories, which themselves can unlock further memories still, is doing his job far more successfully.
For Béla Hamvas, the author of The Philosophy of Wine (1945), the most apprehensive of the five senses is taste. When you observe babies discovering a new object, inevitably they’ll put it in their mouths to try and understand what it is exactly. Taste is how we most authentically perceive something’s essence, with smell closely following in second place. This claim would be worth exploring even if Hamvas’s purpose were merely to write a book about phenomenology or pragmatism, but Hamvas’s aims are more elevated than that. Taste is an animalistic sense, and yet for Hamvas it’s also paradoxically the most spiritual of the senses. Unlike the animals, man, having a higher consciousness, can refine and focus his understanding of what he’s tasting. This brings him to a deeper connection to the physical world around him, and through that world, ultimately God. For that reason, Hamvas conceived of The Philosophy of Wine as a “prayer book for atheists,” since he felt that atheism carries with it a sensibility that cheapens and dulls the direct experience of life.
Béla Hamvas’s attitude expressed throughout this book ultimately makes for a good antidote to the dangers of total disembodiment, not to mention abortive attempts at re-embodiment, that today’s digital world presents to us, and that’s why I think it’s worth discussing at length.
II. Scientism
Despite its title, The Philosophy of Wine is really not a book of serious philosophy. It is a short, breezy, conversational book rife with leisurely asides, humorous stories, and charming digressions. It is also just as much a meditation on the joy of drinking wine as it is a polemic against Hamvas’s two most despised classes of people: the atheists, and the pietists/puritans, i.e. the religious types who promote world-renouncing asceticism, denying themselves any kind of indulgence. For Hamvas, the atheists and the pietists both essentially suffer from the same affliction, namely that of “abstract life,” and Hamvas sees the stain of this abstract conception of life in not only teetotalism and self-denial but also things like hypocritical binge eating and full-blown alcoholism — for him, two sides of the same coin.
Though his harshest disapproval is towards the pietists/puritans, Hamvas directs his book towards the atheists in particular, even as he spends paragraph after paragraph mocking and insulting them. The reason being, atheists are merely pathetic and mentally deficient — they ultimately do have a religion without knowing it, since everyone always sacrifices his life for some kind of calling, wittingly or not. Despite their ignorance, Hamvas sees hope in getting them to recognize that they’re sacrificing themselves for a bad religion. His plan, therefore, is to trick them into realizing that God can speak to them directly through the intoxication of wine, and if they can perceive the essence of God in this state of wine-drunkenness, then this epiphany will ultimately bring their thoughts and feelings into a higher kind of sobriety. The pietists and puritans, however, are completely beyond saving, since they have already convinced themselves that they believe in God under a purely abstract and disembodied pretense. They are the true enemy for Hamvas, and this is why he devotes relatively little space to attacking them.
For Hamvas, the atheists have fallen prey to scientism, a now-familiar subject of critique from a wide array of thinkers spanning C.S. Lewis to Friedrich Hayek. He calls these kinds of atheists “scientifists,” and he describes them like so:
Characteristic of the scientifist is that he doesn’t know love, but rather “sexual instinct.” He doesn’t work; he “produces.” He doesn’t eat; he “consumes.” He doesn’t sleep; he “restores his biological energies.” He doesn’t feed on meat, potatoes, plums, pears, apples, or bread with honey and butter, but rather “calories,” “vitamins,” “carbohydrates,” and “protein.” He doesn’t drink wine, but rather “alcohol.” He weighs his body seven times a week, and if he has a headache, he takes eight different pills. When he gets diarrhea from drinking under-fermented wine, he rushes off to a doctor. He deliberates on the increasing life expectancy of man. He considers questions of hygiene to be unresolved, because he can wash a nail brush with soap, and he can wash the soap with water, but there’s nothing with which he can wash the water.
[all translations are mine]
Much has changed since The Philosophy of Wine was written, but Hamvas’s remarks on scientism unquestionably amount to one of his more enduring critiques. I’ll try to explain why. Even among “foodies” today, concerns with bodily health per se tend to drown out all discussion of the actual food, and consequently, there emerges a kind of obsession with the vitamins and nutrients themselves, even though simply striving to eat good, delicious meals all the time will almost always take care of one’s ailments.
This problem even occurs in people who profess to be critical of scientism and thus ought to know better. For instance, I noticed about a year ago that people had started obsessing over glycine, an amino acid that aids with sleep. They were talking about it with a certain degree of fanaticism, suggesting that it has been cruelly removed from our diets through the evils of the corporate food industry, and we absolutely must rectify this problem. The claim isn’t entirely wrong, and surely, glycine is good. But the emphasis on glycine as such results in a pseudo-solution, namely to purchase needlessly expensive supplement tablets and “bone broth” powder before the scientifist inevitably gets bored of that particular nutrient and moves onto the next dietary fad obsession. It doesn’t occur to these people that glycine is found all over American gas stations and grocery stores in the form of pickled pork lips, and it’s readily available if you just go to your butcher and ask him for some hog head cheese. An apparent problem presented as a matter of highbrow dietary esotericism in fact resolves itself through the cheapest and lowest-class foods on the market, which old black guys in the deep south still eat simply because it tastes good to them.
One reason we know that scientism cannot help us in matters of diet is that Americans today know more about the science of nutrition than ever before, and yet Americans are also fatter and unhealthier than they’ve ever been. And, lest someone suggest that this knowledge is distributed unevenly, my own experience tells me that the fat and unhealthy people are no less informed than the slender and fit ones. Back in the 1990s, there was a TV advertisement campaign for a soft drink called Surge, and at the end of each ad, a voiceover came on, saying, “Surge: it’s a fully loaded citrus soda with carbos.” The reason it said this was that back then, “carbo” was a magic word. No one understood what the hell a “carbohydrate” was, and so the advertisers could pretend that it’s some sort of edible talisman that will empower you to achieve all of your dreams. In sports drink ads, the word “electrolytes” was similarly brandished about. Nowadays, such advertisements couldn’t work, because people know what these things are. And yet, everyone during the 1990s was fitter and leaner than now. From what I can tell, the scientifists today still have no appreciation for food and beverage, continuing on with calculated nutrition regimens that help drive their empty and sterile lives. Meanwhile, the plebeians see the task of being healthy as too much like doing homework for school, and so in response they choose what they consider to be the path of least resistance and gorge themselves on corporate slop. In such an arrangement, few cultivate any sense of taste.
One common expression of abstract life particularly relevant to our subject is the scientifist’s fascination with studies which purportedly demonstrate that wine expertise is fake, or that the wine industry is fraudulent, or some other such thing. I first encountered this kind of posturing pseudo-populism on an episode of Penn & Teller’s Bullshit as a teenager, and the tendency has only grown since then. Whenever I ask these people to tell me what the studies are meant to prove in plainly stated terms, no one ever seems to know exactly what to say. The use of these studies typically takes the form of a motte and bailey. If these people wanted to offer a strong position, it would go something like, “These studies demonstrate that professional sommeliers are often inadequately trained and ill-suited to judge wine,” or, “Wines start to taste more or less equally good once they’ve gone past a certain price point,” or, “A relatively cheap table wine can be just as good as an expensive one.” OK… no arguments here.
But when I observe these people in their natural environment, discussing such matters among themselves, it’s rather clear to me that these studies are so important to them because they’re thought to justify the abstract life, the reduction of all qualitative differences between one food item and another to mere differences in micronutrients and caloric content. I believe that if you cornered one of these people and forced him to reveal his true thoughts, he would eventually confess that he thinks the studies show that soil quality doesn’t matter, climate conditions are irrelevant, no one can tell the difference between one wine made from a Pinot Noir grape and another made from a Syrah, the subtleties in taste are all made up, and in sum, there’s no difference between good and bad wine. And of course, in doing so, the man would only reveal his miserable and blighted disposition. Some of these people even think that when blindfolded, it’s impossible to tell the difference between a red and a white!
III. Sophia Perennis
What Hamvas is ultimately criticizing is referred to by the perennial traditionalist René Guénon as the “reign of quantity,” in which the reverential appreciation of form characteristic of traditional societies has fully given way to a sterile and procedural capitulation to matter in all aspects of life. Guénon finds evidence of this degeneration from form to matter in a diverse array of phenomena, like the mass manufacturing of goods, the transition from coinage to fiat currency, and shifts in the collectively held image of the Earth. The similarities between the ideas of Guénon and Hamvas are no coincidence, either. Hamvas was a follower of the perennial traditionalist school of thought, and he was an avid reader of both Guénon and Julius Evola (I discuss this elsewhere in a blog post here). Guénon’s magnum opus The Reign of Quantity and the Signs of the Times came out in 1945, and Hamvas wrote The Philosophy of Wine very quickly during the summer of the same year, so I wouldn’t be too shocked if there were some immediate influence.
Béla Hamvas is almost never discussed outside of Hungary (even in books expressly about perennial traditionalism!), and few of those who know him in Hungary know much about perennial traditionalism. For instance, this quite recent article in Hungarian Conservative discusses Hamvas’s interest in philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Bergson, Heidegger, and Klages, but the author scarcely seems to know what the scientia sacra in which Hamvas believed actually was, or what it was about. This is quite unfortunate, because Guénon’s approach to perennialism was quite distinct from all other modern iterations, it’s instantly recognizable once you get to know it, and I don’t think it’s possible to discuss Hamvas’s thought adequately without acknowledging his involvement in that particular platonic-orientalist school of metaphysics.
After all, the perennialist sensibility pervades even this comparatively relaxed, playful romp of a book. For instance, in the first major section, “The Metaphysics of Wine,” Hamvas classifies different liquids in the same manner as the Pythagoreans classified the metals, planets, days of the week, musical notes, and other phenomena. Observe:
Blood: Sun - Sunday - A - red - gold - 1
Beer: Moon - Monday - C - white - silver - 2
Water: Mercury - Wednesday - F - yellow - quicksilver - 7
Tea (Coffee): Mars - Tuesday - G - violet - iron - 4
Milk: Venus - Friday - E - green - copper - 5
Oil: Jupiter - Thursday - D - blue - tin - 6
Wine: Saturn - Saturday - B - black - lead - 3
This kind of classification scheme falls right at home with the kind of syncretism and chart-making that you’d see starting in the Renaissance with thinkers such as Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, the earliest antecedents to the Guénonian brand of tradition. It also gives us a clue as to why Hamvas felt that wine is the best way to defeat atheism.
According to Hamvas, Saturn is the symbol of the great paradisiacal condition that prevailed during the Golden Age, which he sees as a metaphysical state of being, something ever-presently accessible to those who possess the correct inner temperament. It is also a symbol bound up with paradox, something Hamvas loves. According to the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, Saturn was the god who reigned over the Golden Age, in which harvests yielded abundant fruits that the people all enjoyed without the expense of any labor. But outside of this “golden age,” Saturn is also the god who oversees the passage of time and the dissolution of all life, and thus he’s quite fearsome. The late Roman Saturnalia was a harvest festival intended to simulate the lost conditions of the Golden Age, and so the social ranks were flipped upside-down and revelry prevailed above everything. This is nice, but it’s something that always carries an element of the sinister, as any reader of The Bacchae will understand. Later on, in the medieval period, the term saturnine was coined to describe people of a gloomy and melancholic disposition, thought to be born under Saturn’s astrological sign. And alchemists, for their part, believed that Saturn is associated with lead, the coarsest and most corrupted of the metals… and hence the one they sought to turn into gold! Hamvas felt that only through this profoundly contradictory mode of orientation could the excessively self-disciplined atheist achieve an enlightened kind of drunkenness that would then help him recognize the limitations of his impoverished “materialism” and incomplete “science,” turning ultimately to the embrace of God, reaching (as I mentioned before) the truest form of sobriety.
Moreover, Hamvas reasons, understanding wine through direct experience allows even the most hardened atheist to understand that nature never repeats herself. Having attained such knowledge, he might then appreciate the folly of trying to apprehend nature’s inexhaustible depth through scientific abstractions, clumsy formulae, and doomed heuristics. The type of grape, the soil, the climate, and the care with which a wine was created gives each and every batch a distinct essence, and with it, a distinct kind of intoxication. Hamvas is adamant about the value of achieving spiritual enlightenment by way of grasping the essence of particulars, because he thinks each plant and animal carries its own presiding sub-deity:
In the original state of creation, the Garden of Eden, the most tender and fragrant oils held by the spirituality of the world were preserved by the plants. As a matter of fact, every plant is itself a eudaemon, i.e. an angel, and I can recognize this little daemon by its shape, color, blossom, or fruit, though not directly — only in the abstract, the same way the eye recognizes something. Only the nose can gain direct experience with a living plant, because the oils residing within it will relay its greatest profundities. The scent is the secret of the plant’s being.
He’s clearly setting up a point about tasting the hidden essence of each wine, but this is an easygoing and digressive book, so Hamvas goes on a detour to discuss how the sense of smell also carries the privileged ability to experience directly each and every woman’s presiding daemon. He recommends his audience to check out D.H. Lawrence’s writing to get a good sense of this sort of thing, particularly if they are chaste, and then indicates that the best fragrant oils on women are located in their upper inner-thigh, and especially the small crevice in the back of their knees. Hamvas would have no tolerance for the sterilized, pornographic understanding of sex, which caters only to man’s intellective senses. Anyways, he eventually gets back to the point:
After all this, it will now be easily guessed what I’d like to say about wine. Every wine is particular. In every wine (type, vintage, region, terroir, age) there lives its own inimitable and irreplaceable eudaemon. The eudaemon is the materialized form of the oil; its mask. Each part of a woman’s body has its own distinct scent, and it cannot be confused for any other. Why so? Because the others are inhabited by their own daemons. Wine is a drink containing spiritual oils. In every wine, there lives a little angel who will not die if the man drinks it, but instead will live among the incalculably great amount of little faeries and angels already residing within that man. When the man drinks, those living inside of him welcome the newly arriving little eudaemon with song lyrics and cascading flowers. Our faerie is thus enchanted and soon kindles into fire due to its joy. This joyful flame inside of the man overwhelms and captivates him — there is no defense against this. For that reason, I say that a glass of wine is atheism’s leap of death.
This explanation, while admittedly a little strange, is not terribly distant from how the alchemists understood things, both in medieval Europe and the Levant, since they too were interested in extracting the living essence from various plants and fruits. This desire was in fact how they got involved in the development of perfumes, and it’s why they developed and refined the practice of distillation.
Because Hamvas argues for the apprehension of the divine through the materiality of the earth, he comes a bit closer to the sensibilities of Julius Evola than René Guénon. Guénon felt that in order to achieve a higher state of spiritual depth, you must find a religion that still has some connection to the sophia perennis and become fully devout within it, obeying all of its rules with the utmost reverence. He did precisely this with Sufi Islam. Evola, on the other hand, felt that the “left hand path” was a valid option, since he saw evidence of it in all traditional religions. In fact, Evola’s first book was about this subject, though couched in the language of Italian idealism. It was called L'uomo come potenza (“Man as Power,” 1925), in which he argued that the only way to solve the pragmatic issues that Kantian idealism presents is through direct material experience, namely through the use of magic. He essentially rewrote this thesis 24 years later as Lo Yoga della potenza (“The Yoga of Power”), which is organized as a running commentary on the scholarship of John Woodroffe, one of the first serious writers on Hindu Tantra.
One major difference, however, between Evola and Hamvas is that Evola never failed to stress the potential danger of the left hand path. He made it perfectly clear that using intoxicants for spiritual purposes outside of an established faith (i.e. with rigorous procedures, like receiving communion) requires more discipline than absolute world-renunciation, not less. For that reason, so he argues, it can only properly be achieved by a small chosen few; it is not something for the masses. Hamvas, perhaps a bit irresponsibly, makes very little mention of all the problems that can arise through the quaffing of wine, particularly when one assigns to it a lofty spiritual significance. When looking up online user-reviews of this book, one of the most common accusations of Hamvas I see is that he was merely rationalizing his own hedonism, and although I don’t believe this is correct, it’s an understandable charge. I suppose Hamvas figured that since science-obsessed atheists are already so disciplined in one area, the drinking of wine might compel them to transfer this already-rigorous discipline onto an incongruous field of contemplation, one that broadens and expands their understanding of life and its profound complexities. Thus, wine is not presented as a vehicle for initiatory magic, or anything so extreme, but merely as a way to open one’s eyes. That is, in any case, my attempt to “steel man” his approach, to borrow from the parlance of the scientifist.
IV. Today’s World
When Hamvas wrote this book in 1945, World War II was ending and the Soviet Union was engaged in a number of sieges and infiltrations into Hungary, which would last until 1948, the country then having become a full-fledged Soviet satellite state. Hamvas makes no mention of this, preferring to focus on joyful matters. It was perhaps the last time he could get away with such a book, because what happened in the following decades forms a sad conclusion to his musings. For one thing, once the Soviets took over, the production of wine became completely state-controlled, and thus its quality dropped immensely. For example, the Egri Bikavér (“Bull’s Blood of Eger”), one of Hungary’s most celebrated wines, turned into low-quality swish, mass-produced and mass-exported for a more forgiving international market. Hamvas, for his part, was completely frozen out of the university system despite being one of the more interesting thinkers in the country, not to mention fluent in quite a few languages. The main reason given was that he was a staunch advocate of modernism and surrealism in the arts, something that the literary theorist György Lukács found unacceptable, and so Lukács stooged Hamvas out to the government for his anti-proletarian sensibilities, destroying what could have been a good career. Hamvas eventually took a job working at a factory, and he continued to write, albeit at a much slower pace, under samizdat. The Soviet government, based on the atheistic and scientistic pseudo-religion of Marxism, essentially proved everything Hamvas was saying to be true, with its crappier wines and overall degradation of life.
It thus makes for a somewhat reassuring denouement to learn that once the Soviet Union fell, Hungary’s cellars and vineyards were liberated once again, and the quality of its wine shot right back up — it might even be better than ever before as I’m writing this. But with the new domination of American-led mass democracy, a whole new slew of problems arrived, and these problems are worth discussing briefly as I wrap up this little discussion.
Here’s a question. Are today’s western elites alienated from their senses of taste and smell? Are they living the disembodied, abstracted lives that Hamvas was writing about as characteristic of the modern atheist? In one sense, no, but in another, yes. There’s no question that today’s elites — i.e., the members of the mostly wealthy upper-middle-class who have ensconced themselves within high-rent urban enclaves and coastal suburbs — have cultivated taste. In fact, for some of them, it’s just about all they have. Anyone who has lived in an America city through the turn of the 21st century will have noticed an explosion of small businesses selling better and better wines, beers, gourmet hamburgers and donuts, artisanal coffees and cheeses, and other various culinary delights. And these places all cater largely to an upper-middle-class, college-educated clientele. Wealthy people, in fact, will often pay extra money for food that medieval peasants had no choice but to eat, just to get “the authentic experience.” Even perfume has reached an unprecedented degree of quality with a similar explosion of niche houses that carry a wide, almost shocking variety of scents.
And yet, I think most of these cultivated people can be accused of coming from the wrong mentality. In 1995, the historian and social critic Christopher Lasch wrote in his Revolt of the Elites about how America’s modern social elites have essentially run away from the rest of the masses and shirked their duty to lead them, instead preferring to hide amongst themselves in little wealthy enclaves. They’ve removed themselves altogether from hard labor, alienated themselves from the experience of the soil (even as they devour its fruits), and they’ve essentially taken on the tourist’s experience of everything, even when walking through the neighborhoods that lie right next to theirs. In 2001, the NY Times columnist David Brooks covered the same exact kinds of people in his book Bobos in Paradise (“bobo” is a neologism meaning “bourgeois bohemian”), and the book doesn’t quite deny or contradict anything Lasch was saying. In fact, I don’t believe it acknowledges Lasch at all. But if we were to take that book as an unofficial response, it would go something like, “Yes, fine, but have you tried the little sandwiches they’ve been making??”
The problem with the modern western aesthetic sensibility is that following the enlightenment, its intellectuals became plagued by the idea of ars gratia artis, or “art for the sake of art,” something I discuss a little in my first blog post here. This notion prompted a mentality that cared little for the various practical uses that art can have (including political ones), preferring only to consider the art itself as a sovereign phenomenon, extracted from everything surrounding it, including the experiences of the viewing subject. The concern for the practicality of art or the subjective experience of it is something that traditional civilizations never had any problems with (see aesthetic treatises by guys like Zeami or Abhinavagupta), and the denigration of such concerns must be understood as a relatively recent trend in world history. Predictably, this ideal of ars gratia artis led over time to the phenomenon of elite snobbery.
Noticing all of this in the 1960s, Pierre Bourdieu wrote Distinction, in which he systematically takes down the pretense of the modern aesthete and explores how art, culture, food, and other various phenomena of daily life serve primarily to establish social class hierarchies. Bourdieu’s work contains occasional strong insights and observations, but its problem is that it assumes that there is no metaphysically or ontologically motivated basis for any distinctions or aesthetic judgments whatsoever — a fatal flaw characteristic of all (post-)structuralism, and a big enough one to scrap the whole school of thought altogether. Since then, the self-absorbed snobs and Bourdieu-inflected scientifists have been at war, with few intervening voices of reason and clarity to be heard.
In Hamvas’s work, you never see any discussion of money occur, and you never see any attempts to rank the wines numerically, or with any other kind of grading system. What you do see is plenty of discussion on when to enjoy a certain kind of wine, which kinds of wine work for which occasions, which foods to pair each wine with, what kind of mental state you must be in to enjoy a certain kind of wine, what kind of people will enjoy certain wines, and so on. The discussion becomes surprisingly pragmatic — Hamvas seems to think there’s a wine for just about every person and every occasion, and although he cares deeply about how they taste and certainly has his opinions, he doesn’t fall into the trap of the modern aesthete. Which is to say, he never once entertains the notion that there is some sort of mystical, platonic archetype for a wine that one particular grape or terroir can best instantiate, and which can be enjoyed in conditions that fully isolate the taste of the wine from its surrounding world. He is far too sensible for this kind of silliness, and whatever faults wine snobbery may have, one of wine’s greatest strengths is that there is no way to discuss it intelligently without also discussing how one should best appreciate it. More criticism of art, music, and literature should be this way.
We’re veering off into a subject worth an entirely separate discussion. And anyway, it’s perhaps all the more pointless to delve into it now because the attitude of the modern liberal aesthete is starting to become obsolete as time goes on. Snobbery lingers on in some aging hipsters, to be sure, but for many others, the snobbery of food, literature, and music taste has gradually given way to the fully abstract snobbery of “luxury beliefs,” one of the few recent neologisms worth keeping around. But if it’s true that the kinds of people who would have been wine snobs a decade ago are now ideology snobs, then perhaps food and beverage might stand a chance of re-enchanting the world without the snobs, aesthetes, and other ill-intentioned morons ruining everything.
Whatever the case may be, I will conclude with this point. The past thirty-four years have shown that Hamvas was perhaps a bit too naïve about the power of wine. It is sadly insufficient to convert an atheist into a man of higher sensibilities. Even if it were somehow enough, still the atheist rarely keeps the right sensibility once the revelry has faded and his hangover has set in. But despite Hamvas’s naïveté, he was still correct to say that the non-intellective senses are the best means through which one can break the shackles of abstract life, and wine is a great way to do it. It’s just that this approach must be tempered with the right attitude and intention, two things that the atheist, scientifist, and others belonging to the dorkus malorkus genus will simply not have. Only those who are sympathetic to Hamvas’s intentions from the start will be able to put his ideas to good use. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a chance you might be one such person.
The Philosophy of Wine is currently the only book by Béla Hamvas that has been translated into English. I think this unfortunate situation should be remedied.
All I see is a beret~ working man suuure
He looks like he can learn to fall off a 20 foot ladder at any Thomas Bernhard time ~ life