If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world.

"Last night somebody said to me, Come on—all the five, six times I have seen you, you have been drunk out of your mind. I was drunk last night too, when he was telling it to me. I resented the implication that I had been, in the five, six times we had seen each other, any drunker than he had been. For we are all, all of us, drunk all the time, and it’s no fair for him to single me out like that and make me the exception, when if it comes to the drinking habits in the circles I run in, I am the rule. The rule is: drink as much as you can afford to drink. We all, anyway, work better when we are drunk, or wake up the next morning, hungover. In either case, we lack the capacity to second-guess ourselves.

People now say there is no direction to evolution—upward to any height; that the proper metaphor is the outward webbing of a bush, not the striving of a tree toward the heavens. When we were children, we would lift our arms to the skies as high as we could—as tall as we could make ourselves—stretch, stretch, stretch!

When I look back on those gym classes and how we all stretched ourselves to be as tall as the tallest tree, I can’t help but think, Those were the most religious moments of my life.

If now in some ways I drink too much, it’s not that I lack a reverence for the world."

-Via here