Buggers for the Bottle: Part VII, in which Aristotle is shown to possess little capacity for reason

Yesterday afternoon I laboured until close of day to translate the final instalment of my Wendish seafaring discourses from the Anglo-Saxon. I donned my best gloves and made for the Muted Slughorn. Seeing, as I crossed the heath, that January 26 was not long for this world and that night was surely in the offing, I resolved to make it a brief visit. When I arrived the front room was deserted, but from the furthest recesses of the building I could hear distant shrill voices, the tinkling of martini glasses and animated conversation. Not wishing to disturb the barman, snatches of whose velvet baritone rose, unmistakable, above the fervent offerings of the live Jazz band, I went behind the bar and poured myself a few gentle measures of spiced rum and ginger wine. I shuffled over to a table, and had barely raised mug to lip when the door flew open and Hamilton tore in, making a beeline for the bar. Clearing the counter in a single leap, he proceeded to mix and drink all manner of frantic concoctions, not stopping to consider whether the bottles he was grasping – albeit with commendable suction – were spirits, culinary lubricants, bathing unguents or domestic cleaners. Knowing from experience that intervention was futile, I returned to my drink without a word. After a short time he relented and joined me at the table with a small wooden breadboard of single malts. Knowing that it would very soon fall to me to make some sort of enquiry in respect of his behaviour, and though he was still livid and flushed from the ordeal, he pre-empted the overwhelming interrogative and, fixing me with a look of combined alacrity and rage which only the most hardened insomniac could have mustered, articulated with superlative cogency, given his weakened state, that for all the damned good it did, one might very well dismiss the entire corpus of literary critical theory! Not wishing to seem timid in the teeth of such an astonishing claim, I laughed a careless, ‘might-one-indeed?’ sort of laugh; but really I was paralysed with terror. I straight returned and reeled into bed. I slept badly and woke with a headache. Two Anadins later I was feeling better, though still quite weak. I took up a book of Aristotelian political conjectures and read:

“Those who live in a cold climate and in Europe are full of spirit, but wanting in intelligence and skill; and therefore they retain comparative freedom, but have no political organisation, and are incapable of ruling others. Whereas the natives of Asia are intelligent and inventive, but they are wanting in spirit, and therefore they are always in a state of subjection and slavery. But the Hellenic race, which is situated between them, is likewise intermediate in character, being high-spirited and also intelligent.”

The simplicity of the author’s argument, and the gleeful, contrafactual abandon with which he presented it, soothed my troubled mental state and fortified me sufficiently that I was able to take a little breakfast.