Kahlua

Zoroaster got it half right. Life is a desperate struggle between two bitterly opposed polarities - not good and bad, nor truth and falsehood; they don't come into the picture, they are irrelevancies - we're talking about love and emptiness; ecstacy and depression; work and pleasure; opacity and perspicuity; coffee and alcohol.

Coffee and alcohol. There are but two humours - coffee and alcohol - and life's struggles are the simple tension between them. Without them, one is bereft, and in the darkness of uninitiated childhood. With either, one is unbalanced, and sees only a dim half of what life may be.

But marry both in one (if something so perfect may be imagined) and you catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of the ineffable and the infinite. And kahlua is a reminder of this fundamental duality of the human condition.