Reading between the Wines, With a New Preface. Terry Theise

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      PREFACE TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION

      This book was completed a little over two years ago. It has its share of unfinished business, and that is partly by design, as one of its theses is that unfinished business is fun.

      I have an abiding and evanescent concern about wines that show a strange force of gentleness that makes us grope for a language by which it may be described. Or so I have supposed. I've just finished a helpful book by Stanley Fish called How to Write a Sentence, and in the course of ruminating over transparency in language, Fish writes, “A lapidary style is polished and cut to the point of transparency. It doesn't seem to be doing much. It does not demand that attention be paid to it. It aspires to a self-effacement that allows the object to shine through.”

      I have always admired this effect in writing, as in Bernhard Schlink's exquisitely careful, judicious prose in The Reader, or the recent poems of Robert Hass, which seem so plainly written as to cause us to question just what we think poetry is, or should be. And I've found—or imagine myself to have found—the same effect in certain wines, such as Helmut Dönnhoff's, or those of the Saahs family at Nikolaihof. I didn't have a word for it, and so I shot a pile of arrows toward it. Now there is this fine word lapidary that will shove all the other adjectives out of my quiver.

      Still, even after I've gained a helpful new word, the old questions persist. How can these ostensibly demure wines convey such numinousness? And when I am caught in the web of this mystery, what is the nature of this place? Who, what lives here? Is it as still as it seems? Why do these wines affect me so keenly? How can they exist at all?

      This book seeks to explore not how such questions may be answered but how they might best be framed. What is happening to us in the moment when we have formed the question but don't know the way to the answer? It's like the holding of a very small breath, a pause among the beats of living. There are worse things to preoccupy a fella.

      I was on the Mosel, and it had rained for days. Good weather for working, people said. Dreary, though, and each morning I'd peer out at the still-sodden sky and wish there were a treadmill somewhere nearby.

      But then it dried out one day, and there were even furtive bolts of sun, so I announced I was going to walk the seven kilometers through the vineyards from Zeltingen to Graach, and would try to be on time for my visit with Willi and Christoph Schaefer.

      In the last few years a path system has been completed that carries the happy walker straight through the vineyards from village to village. You used to have to scramble in the Wehlener Sonnenuhr vineyard, but now you can tromp like the civilized gentleman you assuredly are. (That would be you, not me: I was schvitzing like a donkey and loving it.) It's a mid-slope path, well above the river, and you can look down into the lunatic steepness and up to the twittery woods. I got the lovely lostness you get when you walk awhile—no more thoughts, just a slow dissolve. Now and again there'd be a wan shaft of sunlight. The air smelled like wet slate.

      So I walked and dreamed, and I dreamed СКАЧАТЬ