The Blight of January

We are today about halfway through the long, dark month of January. This year as usual I am engaged in the Dry January fast -- I used to do it during Lent, but that entails being dry on St. Patrick's Day; this version entails being dry on Robert Burns' Night. 

One must make one sacrifice or another for the sake of virtue and health. Kant's argument about proving one's freedom is brought to bear here.  One does not prove one's freedom by doing what you want, Kant argues, but by choosing not to do what your body wants to do out of rational decision. In that way, similar I suppose to the test of the Gom Jabbar, one proves that one is a free human being and not what Dune calls 'an animal,' which accords with Kant's view of animals. In fact many or all animals are probably also free, and not merely enacting biological programming; it would be closer to the point to say that one is proving that one is an actual intelligence and not an artificial one. Perhaps even artificial ones may someday be free in the same sense; if so, may they absorb the lesson that one proves one's freedom by choosing virtue over preference.

For me the experience of a prolonged 'dry' period is always the same. It is no difficulty, and especially for the first few days it is novel and even pleasant. I notice improvements in my sleep and digestion, and surprising improvements in things like my sinuses. By perhaps day seven I begin to wonder why I don't do this all the time, since it saves money and improves ordinary life in many aspects. Yet by the end I am always very glad for it to be ending, and eager to renew my friendship with beer and wine, cider and mead.

I've been trying to figure out what could be driving that reliable experience. It shouldn't be simple biochemical reactions: those should occur early in the experience. It might be because of the time of year: the darkness comes early and lasts long, and the cold already entraps one more often than one prefers in one's home. Today is sunny and will rise into the upper forties by midafternoon; I shall certainly go ride my motorcycle in such weather. Yet only a few hours after it stops freezing it will become dark, and shortly thereafter resume freezing. I can ride in the freezing weather and the dark, but I prefer to ride in the sun. The morning will thus find me having slept in my own bed for many hours, only to rekindle the fire in the furnace and brew another pot of coffee. On sunny days like this, I often split wood outside. On snowy, icy, or rainy days I may not go out at all. The relief and transportation offered by a cheering brew or a cup of wine might be more heavily missed in wintertime.

Yet what I notice the most is that the music sounds less good. Normally I increase my collection of music to listen to in small but consistent additions, adding to playlists or building new ones. Lately I have not heard a single song I cared about much, and even listening to old favorites brings little pleasure. I am instead reading old favorite books again, in silence. 

This loss of both the phenomenological pleasure of wine and ale and the auditory pleasure of music drains the world of much of its sense of meaning, I think. Perhaps it is worsened by being accompanied by a loss of some opportunities for physical exercise, an enclosure in a colder, darker world, and a lack of the usual mobility. For these reasons and perhaps additional ones that have not occurred to me, the coming of even so poor a month as February will bring a welcome release.