Based on the Decision-Making Processes of the Ancient Persians as Reported by Herodotus

Herodotus, the historian, wrote that, “If an important decision is to be made, [the ancient Persians would] discuss the question when they are drunk, and … the next day and while sober.” [1] This has stuck in my mind ever since I read it, for this is how I’d like to live my life.

I don’t mean making decisions like this, discussing – or even just thinking over – everything twice. Wise as the Persians may have been.

I’d like to live my life twice, once sober and once drunk.

I’d tiptoe through when sober, as I usually do. That first time I’d be as I am: timorous, worried, thinking too much about everything. I’d be sober, in all senses. But I’d make up for it on the drunken turn. In my drunken time through, I’d enjoy the artificial confidence. The disconnect from pain. The knowledge that there could be no real consequences.

Then I’d be bold. Then I’d be witty, wise with the benefit of experience, and beer. I’d notice everything and not mind anything. Rejection? Pah. Wouldn’t even dampen the cuffs of my pants. I’d feel God’s finger on me every day. And long nights alone with my laptop would slip past in quick, unsteady bliss.

Now, the first time I ever drank anything like a quantity of alcohol, it was summer and I was in China. This was a few years back. After long conversation and much Bob Marley and much beer, I went to walk back to my dorm. In the dark of the unlighted street I stepped into a foot-deep uncovered drain hole. And as my shin scraped hard down the uneven concrete edge I thought, “That would hurt, if I were sober.”

It’s that distance I want. To be able to think slowly but clearly – for it is a kind of clarity. To observe, to be objective, to be an object to myself.

If I lived life once drunk and once sober, I could savor everything: pain, knowing that next time it’d be far from me. And joy, knowing that next time it’d be that much better.

As it is, there’s just this once. As it is, all this is chance and I have to guess how best to prepare myself each day.

[1] The Histories, Book I. 

Once awake, I’d roll back old stones and peer at the grubs and worms of memory and conscience. The hours spent hunting sadness passed quickly. Now the earplugs take up what is in my head and show it to the morning, adhesive and greedy for dust. They grow dingy gray and yellow from use. I cannot bring myself to wash them.

The earplugs keep the neighbors out. But they do not bring silence. Rather they subtract all other sounds and leave cicadas buzzing. It is a burning, bright sound: the sound of poplars and asphalt, clouded with ochre dust frosting, a sepia rash on the skin of the world. It is the sound of past life.

You’d never see the cicadas living, not then. You’d hear their endless cyclone song — you couldn’t not hear it. Past the pond, clotted with poplar leaves rinsed clean of dust. Past the anarchic copse, along hot walls, into the only road that went anywhere. The cicadas bored a tunnel through summer. 

It was only in death and dying that they appeared and dropped in the dust. Their bodies of thick and shiny meringue were insubstantial, easy to crush. But the cicadas’ stiff prism wings were strong and brittle. You could hold them and watch the last, silent stretches. Now the cicadas wake me to solitary pre-dawn contemplation. They are closer than the neighbors, and earplugs cannot mute them. 

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