Life's Pleasures Quote by Jose Bergamin

Bergamin turns drunkenness into a moral litmus test, then denies it the one alibi people most like to grant: context. In peacetime, getting drunk reads as evasion, a small surrender to the self when nothing is forcing your hand. In wartime, the same act isn’t upgraded into tragic heroism or understandable coping; it’s merely cowardice with louder artillery in the background. The sting is in the repetition: “goes on being a coward.” War doesn’t transform character so much as expose it, and the bottle doesn’t redeem fear, it just anesthetizes it.

The intent is less temperance lecture than a jab at romantic myths. Cultures that sanctify wartime excess - the hard-drinking soldier, the poet in the trenches, the “we earned this” binge - often treat intoxication as proof of authenticity. Bergamin refuses that narrative. He’s also quietly indicting spectators who indulge vicarious drama: if war is the grand stage for meaning, then surely the vices committed under its lights must be meaningful too. Not here. Cowardice stays cowardice.

Context matters because Bergamin is a Spanish writer formed by the 20th century’s ideological bloodbaths, where slogans and self-pity were endlessly available. The line reads like a distrustful Catholic-tinged ethics stripped of consolation: suffering doesn’t automatically ennoble; danger doesn’t cleanse. If you want to claim the dignity of fear, you have to face it awake.