My mornings begin with drinking a glass of water from our deep, sweet well, and each time I try to consciously appreciate it.  A couple of old wise guy’s quotes revived vivid memories of why I do this.  Rumi, the Persian poet, wrote “Thirst drove me to the water / where I drank the moon’s reflection,” and Horace, the Roman poet, asked, “When your throat is parched with thirst, do you desire a cup of gold?,”  My devotion to water is directly attributable to the notorious Alabama football coach, Paul “Bear” Bryant.  His stature in Alabama is near godlike, but for many of my generation who played football in the 1960s under coaches who idolized Bryant and copied his crueler techniques, he remains a sadist.  Bryant’s fame grew after he became the head coach at Texas A&M and turned around a losing team.  He began by holding a special ten-day summer training camp in Junction City, Texas that was in the grip of the worst drought in recorded history with daily temperatures topping 100 degrees.  As Wikipedia described it, “Practices began before dawn and usually lasted all day, with meetings in the evening until 11pm. …. Each day, fewer and fewer players reported for practice, as many quit the team from illness or disgust. The situation was compounded by Bryant’s refusal to allow water breaks. This practice, now widely recognized as dangerous, was … employed by coaches at all levels in an attempt to ‘toughen up’ their players. The only relief provided to the players were two towels soaked in cold water; one towel was shared by the offensive players, and one by the defense.” Consequently, “some players sweated away 10% of their body weight” daily.

            A few years later I played football in Texas under some of Bryant’s disciples who also forbade water during practices, and I, too, regularly lost 10 pounds most days.  Under normal conditions, to survive humans need air within minutes, water within days, and food within weeks, but I’m here to tell you that when 100 degrees is combined with extreme physical exertion, water’s needed within minutes and desire for it quickly grows acute.  Sometimes I had to peel my tongue loose at the ends of practices which regularly ended with “conditioning” drills, like running full speed until the coach blew his whistle indicating we had to dive face-down onto the ground, whereupon he’d quickly blow it again and running ensued a few steps until the enxt whistle.  One particular day middle school football practice came soon after a rainfall, and a few tiny, dirty puddles remained on the chewed-up practice field, and we’d aim for wet spots to try splash some thin mud into our mouths.  No gold cups were required, and hundreds of those cottonmouth days sensitized me to thirst.  “Why Do We Get Thirsty?,” an article from Practical Psychology reported that “Humans experience thirst because receptors in the body detect an imbalance of fluid and want to regain homeostasis” (i.e., balance). “Osmotic thirst, also known as intracellular dehydration, is the type of thirst we experience when our blood cells lose water. That loss of water puts us out of balance. To reach homeostasis, the hypothalamus sends out a message to the body and we begin to feel thirsty …. Osmoreceptors are sensory receptors located throughout the body and brain. When they detect that there is low water in the blood, they send a message out to the hypothalamus” which sends out the message that we feel thirsty.”  The subfornical organ is the specific one senses the balance between the levels of salts and water in our blood, and insufficient water in our blood means water’s drawn from inside our cells, which weakens them. 

            The word “water” has the most ancient origins.  The Online Etymology Dictionary (OED) traces it to the Old English “wæter” from Old Saxon “watar” back to the Proto-Indo-European “wod-or.”  Desire, “to wish or long for, express a wish to obtain,” is too tame to describe acute thirst.  Crave, “to want greatly,” is closer to the mark, as is covet, “to desire or wish for inordinately or without regard for the rights of others.”  Synonyms are useful, especially when they help winnow down to the exact meaning you’re shooting for.  This applies to other thirsts, like the thirst for knowledge which shouldn’t be confused with the simple thirst for books which can easily slip into bibliomania, which Webster’s defines as an “extreme preoccupation with collecting books.”  It’s easy to become entangled in all the “biblio” terms; Oxford English Dictionary lists over twenty, and the Phrontistery Dictionary of Obscure Words lists 

bibliognost (“well-read individual”, biblioklept (“book-thief”), bibliolatry (“worship of the Bible or other books”), bibliomancy (“divination by opening a book at random”), bibliopegist (“bookbinder”), and bibliotics ((“study of documents to determine authenticity”).  But synonyms closer to bibliomania (“craze for books or reading”) range from bibliophily (“love or fondness for books or reading”) to the extremes of bibliotaph            (“one who hoards or hides books”) and bibliophagist (“one who devours books, literally or figuratively”).

            A Psychology Today article by Mark Griffiths, “Hooked and Booked: A Brief Look at Bibliomania,” said “Bibliomania has been reported to be a symptom of some obsessive-compulsive disorders particularly those associated with the collecting and hoarding of books …. Dr. John Ferriar – a British physician from Manchester – had a poem published simply entitled ‘Bibliomania’ that he dedicated to his friend, Richard Heber, a renowned bibliomaniac.  Heber was the wealthy lord of several Shropshire manors who filled up eight other mansions in four other countries with his collection of around 200,000 rare and pretty books.  As Wikipedia noted, “Bibliomania is not to be confused with bibliophilia, which is the (psychologically healthy) love of books, and as such is not considered a clinical psychological disorder … bibliomania is characterized by the collecting of books which have no use to the collector nor any great intrinsic value to a genuine book collector. The purchase of multiple copies of the same book and edition and the accumulation of books beyond possible capacity of use or enjoyment are frequent symptoms of bibliomania.” For an example, “Bibliomania, the Dark Desire for Books That Infected Europe in the 1800s,” an Atlas Obscura article, begins “Dr. Alois Pichler was almost always surrounded by books.  In 1869, Pichler, originally from Bavaria, became the so-called “extraordinary librarian” of the Imperial Public Library in St. Petersburg, Russia …. While many librarians have a deep appreciation for books, Pichler was afflicted with a specific irrepressible illness. A few months after Pichler took his position at the library, the staff discovered that an alarming number of books were disappearing from the collection ….  On March, 1871, over 4,500 stolen library books on everything from perfume making to theology were found in his possession, Pichler committing the largest known library theft on record.  Pichler was put on trial, where his lawyer alleged that the librarian was not in control of his behavior” and “was influenced by a ‘peculiar mental condition, a mania not in the legal or medical sense, but in the ordinary sense of a violent, irresistible, unconquerable passion … This defense was designed to mitigate his punishment, but it didn’t work.  Pichler, who was found guilty and exiled to Siberia, was a victim of ‘bibliomania,’ a dark pseudo-psychological illness that swept through the upper classes in Europe and England during the 1800s. Symptoms included a frenzy for culling and hunting down first editions, rare copies, books of certain sizes or printed on specific paper.”

            George John, the 2^nd Earl Spencer, was on the higher ethereal plane of bibliophilia rather than a maniac. Spencer was a leading politician and a leading “Minister of All Talents” in the unity government that unsuccessfully tried to end the war with Napoleon in 1806.  He was also very wealthy, and his hobby was collecting books from the famed Aldine Press in Venice that was started in 1494 by Aldus Manutius who introduced compact italic print which enabled the publishing of Greek and Roman classics in the first small octavo-sized volumes (about eight or ten inches tall) of and thereby greatly boosted the emerging Renaissance.  Spencer hired Tomaso d’Ocheda, leading Italian librarian to oversee his valuable collection for 29 years, and upon Spencer’s death his Aldine collection was donated to the University of Manchester Library that now possesses 120 of the 127 books Aldus published.  His collection followed the book collecting as a status symbol.  He cofounded the Roxburghe Club along with Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Spencer’s busybody hanger-on librarian/bibliographer who authored the “Bibliotheca Spenceriana” in 1814 that listed and described the most important works in Spencer’s library).

The Roxburghe Club was an early book discussion group whose “original members were all friends and were drawn from the ranks of the nobility, the professional, and the academic classes,” according to roxburgheclub.org/uk/history, who added “Over two centuries later, this this mixture has remained unchanged.”

            All maniacs have compulsive cravings, and while books are one of humanity’s greatest achievements, you can still have too much of a good thing, even water.  As Gautama Buddha declared, “When we free ourselves of overweening desire, we will know serenity.”