Luther said, “How is it that the first drink from a tankard tastes best? Perhaps it’s on account of sin, because our flesh and our lips are sinful.” He wondered if it was because sin has so deeply permeated our bodies that even our taste buds will gravitate toward what is wrong at every chance they get.

I disagree, on the grounds that it also happens with soda—though I wouldn’t expect Luther to have known that the same thing is true of non-alcoholic carbonated drinks. Whether it’s Hefeweizen, Champagne or Diet Coke, you have about 30 seconds from the time it is opened before most of the carbonation has escaped, and with it, the flavor.

The bottling companies will only ever advertise that first drink. They haven’t yet found out how to make something that’s truly “good to the last drop”. All the people on television or billboards who ever looked happy using the product were just taking their first drink. This is the driving force behind everything we buy: they’ll sell us a small slice of heaven, but make us believe we’re buying the whole thing.

The world has promised us happiness, but its happiness is a tree rooted in sand. It’s unsustainable. The first drink is flavored by the evacuation of the flavor, like the brilliance of a dying star. It was sealed in a can for a time, but as soon as the can is opened, the goodness escapes into the atmosphere and beyond our reach. And what’s left is not satisfying.

Purity in this world is fleeting. By the time we discover it, it’s already begun to dissipate. The sound of a plucked note before it starts to decay, the sizzle of fajitas from the restaurant kitchen, the forest just before it’s cleared for residential development—it’s all just a glimpse of an unfallen world, a perfection we can clasp sometimes but never capture.