Life's Pleasures Quote by Clifton Paul Fadiman

Wine is a social drug with a built-in conscience, and Clifton Fadiman knows it. The line flatters the reader into agreement: if you love wine, you must be generous. It is less an observation than a small moral trap, the kind of civilized aphorism that turns taste into character. “Begs to be shared” isn’t just personification; it’s a gentle coercion. The bottle becomes a petitioner, and refusing it starts to feel like bad manners, even bad citizenship.

Fadiman’s subtext is old-world humanism in mid-century American dress. As a writer-critic who moved easily through literary and broadcasting circles, he’s defending a certain idea of culture: refined pleasures are communal, not hoarded. This is the anti-collector’s creed. Compare it to the modern prestige economy where rare bottles become trophies, photographed more than poured. Fadiman’s quip pushes back against that acquisitive impulse by insisting that the point of connoisseurship is conviviality, not possession.

The slyer move is how he launders a social norm through sensory romance. Wine is already coded as conversation, dinner, intimacy; he simply makes that code sound like fact. “I have never met” gives it the authority of experience, not sermonizing, and the word “miserly” does heavy lifting: it casts stinginess as not merely impolite but vaguely grotesque, incompatible with the very identity of “wine lover.” The intent is to elevate sharing from etiquette to essence, a toast to generosity disguised as a wink.