Life & Wisdom Quote by Bernard De Voto

A martini, in De Voto's hands, becomes a tiny tragicomedy: a "great and sudden glory" that peaks fast and burns out even faster. He’s not just praising a drink; he’s praising a particular American appetite for immediacy, the kind that wants transcendence on a timer. The word "proper" is the sly tell. This is a writer’s joke about precision and ritual: the measured pour, the chilled glass, the exact ratio. It’s a ceremony whose payoff is instantaneous and whose consequences arrive right on schedule.

Calling gin and vermouth a "marriage" smuggles domestic language into the bar, then undercuts it with "shortest lived". The humor is neat and a little cruel. Marriages are supposed to endure; cocktails are built to disappear. De Voto lets the metaphor do double duty: the martini is an ideal union because the ingredients truly fuse into something cleaner than either alone, but it’s also a relationship designed for dissolution - consumed, finished, maybe repeated, rarely sustained. It’s intimacy without a future.

The context matters: De Voto wrote in a mid-century America that took its sophistication seriously and its drinking casually, an era of cocktail-hour polish shadowed by the knowledge of excess. His line flatters the reader as someone who understands "proper" taste, then winks at the fact that taste doesn’t prevent overindulgence. The subtext is that modern pleasures are engineered to be brief: the point is the flash, not the aftermath.