“Cogito, ergo sum.” If those famous words of the French philosopher René Descartes aren’t familiar, the English translation undoubtedly is. “I think, therefore I am.”
It is a philosophy that has been echoed and reformulated throughout time. “There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience,” says Immanuel Kant. Jean-Paul Sartre proposes that “existence precedes and rules essence.” In his characteristically diffuse fashion, pragmatist William James says, “There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic scepticism itself leaves standing, — the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists.”
As still other great philosophers of our time observe: Today is. Therefore today is a fine day for a beer.
When you awoke this morning, it was undoubtedly one of the first things you noticed: Today exists. If ever a truth were held as self-evident, it would be the existence of the present moment. The future is only theoretical, the past but a fading memory. Here and now are here, they are now, and they are as tangible as abstractions can be.
The particular wonder of existence on this day is special cause for celebration, though. Most days we expect to happen. This day, some feared would not. By now, said the voices of panic and dread, we might already be sucked into a black hole of our own creation. The inaugural operation of the Large Hadron Collider, a $6 billion particle accelerator, was to be the makings of cosmic cataclysm, a galactic convulsion, a simultaneous act of creation and destruction that would bring about the end of days and the dawn of time.
To say that all fears have been allayed is to ignore this message from the future. But to say that the worst has already happened would be to ignore clear signs from the present. We may yet pass through a wormhole to another time, get sucked into some alternate dimension, or be consumed by strangelets. Clearly, we are not out of the woods. That you’re not dead yet is hardly reason to discard the sound thinking of our nation’s best alarmists and conspiracy theorists. Rather, it is reason to grieve that in this sputtering economy, six billion dollars doesn’t accelerate as many particles as it used to.
Be that as it may, today is. Therefore, today is a fine day for a beer. With the apocalypse thankfully delayed, yet ominously looming, it’s a most fitting day for Unibroue’s La Fin Du Monde. A bottle conditioned Belgian-style tripel, La Fin Du Monde – the end of the world, as any first-year French student could tell you – is a potion as complex as the quantum mechanics that we understand only well enough to be sure of utter destruction. Flavors and aromas collide – sweet and spicy, fruity and malty, and the drying bite of 9% alcohol – to create a decadent but blissful experience that is far preferable to the actual end of the world.
Which, by the way, isn’t imminent.
