“And the Glasses Were Empty”

A reflection on the meaning of the party

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At parties, you feel good. Or at least better than elsewhere. There’s music, there are people, there’s something to drink, and, above all, there isn’t much to explain. You arrive, grab a glass, slip into a conversation you may not even care about that much, and that’s fine. You’re not there to solve anything. You’re there simply to be there. For a few hours, you don’t have to decide anything, you don’t have to be productive, you don’t even have to be especially happy. It is enough just to be there. Inside a party, time loosens its grip, worries remain in the background, the present becomes lighter because it does not demand continuity. No one is really thinking about what comes next. And that is precisely the relief: knowing that moment does not have to lead anywhere.

A party is an escape. A quiet escape, though, without heroics. You do not run away to change your life; you run away to breathe. To stop being trapped inside something that constantly demands attention, decisions, continuity. Inside the party, time turns in on itself. One drink calls for another, one song covers over a thought, one laugh interrupts a sentence that was becoming too serious. There is no plan, no goal. There is only the need to switch off, to be elsewhere without really going anywhere.

A party is not simply a place. It is, rather, a suspension, a time apart in which everything is an end in itself. In that parenthesis, one manages to brush against, even if only illusionally, that fullness we are always chasing. Sartre argues that the human being is structurally driven toward an impossible completeness: we long to be at peace with ourselves, to lack nothing anymore. And de Beauvoir notes that, in the party, this tension comes to a halt for a few hours. Not because it is truly resolved, but because it stops pressing down on us. One experiences something one knows will not last, but that possesses an intensity ordinary life often refuses.

But why do we feel the need to party, if what we experience there is not, after all, a real form of fulfillment? Because the future — where this sense of completeness ought, at least ideally, to be attained — no longer appears as a safe place, a place in which one can still hope. Galimberti would say that we have moved from the “future-as-promise” to the “future-as-threat,” and that is exactly the case. We live immersed in a techno-scientific paradigm that allows only one question: “What is it for?” And that is where the problem begins: how can one find meaning if everything must justify itself in terms of utility? Husserl, already in The Crisis of European Sciences, had shown that scientific progress produces no real improvement in the emotional condition of human beings. This is because the sciences do not speak of us — and even when they do, they speak of us in the abstract — and so the deepest questions of the self never find an answer there.

And so the question of meaning remains unresolved, because it cannot be answered in a world dominated by technology. As a result, that meaning, that transcendence, which once projected itself into the future, is folded back into the present. Aware that this is not authentic happiness, we settle for a kind of half-happiness. This is why de Beauvoir defines the party as “bringing the movement of transcendence to a halt, making the end into an end in itself.” “The absence of the future as promise arrests desire in the absolute present. Better to feel good and gratify oneself today if tomorrow holds no prospect,” Galimberti likewise writes. This does not mean that the present truly becomes absolute; but even if it only remotely resembles such a thing, that is enough, because we savor it as though it were.

One might say that all this is useless and harmful. But that is precisely the point: it is because it is useless that we load it with maximum meaning. In the absence of a future horizon to refer to, the present becomes charged with the meaning the future would otherwise have carried, even if it remains essentially useless. “People eat, drink, light fires, destroy, spend time and riches; they dissipate them uselessly,” writes de Beauvoir. And it is precisely in this dissipation that the value of the party lies. In a world where everything has to answer the question “What is it for?”, uselessness becomes a paradoxically meaningful response. To party is a silent act of defiance against an order that measures everything. “In festivals, in art, human beings express their need to exist in an absolute way,” de Beauvoir again writes. And it is this need to feel fulfilled, complete, that drives us to celebrate. Not because the party truly offers real fulfillment, but because at least it allows us not to think about the future and to feel, for one evening at least, as though we were absolute.

A party is also this: declared waste. Time thrown away, energy spent, money wasted with no return, sleep lost for no reason. But it is a waste that does not apologize. In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille writes that every society produces an excess that cannot be reinvested, and therefore must be dissipated: in festivals, rites, fires, luxury, destruction. Not everything can serve a purpose, not everything can be made useful. The party dwells precisely there, in that unproductive zone the daylight world is always trying to erase. People drink, stay awake, talk too much, laugh for no reason, and none of it builds anything. But that is exactly why it liberates. In a space where every daily gesture seems forced to justify its own existence, the party claims the right to leave no trace, to accumulate nothing, to improve nothing. It is a waste that neither promises the future nor prepares it. And perhaps that is why it is so necessary: because in a world that is always asking us to invest, grow, and become, the party allows us, at least for one night, to consume without having to become something else.

The next day always arrives like a collision with reality. You wake up with a headache from too many drinks, a sore throat from too many cigarettes, and the thought of the questionable choices you made the night before pounding in your head. The suspension of time vanishes, the lightness disappears, and everything returns to demand an account: work, obligations, postponed decisions. It is in that return that the value of the party is truly measured: not in its duration, but in its ability to suspend, for a few hours, the weight of productivity, utility, and the pressing future. That residue of half-happiness remains like a small inheritance, a fragile but powerful memory: we inhabited a present detached from everything else, an absolute time answerable to nothing but itself. And in that act, in that wholly autonomous parenthesis, we swore eternity to one another, if only for a single night.

Walter Benjamin writes that the time of modernity is an empty, homogeneous time, always advancing in the same way, as though each moment existed only to prepare the next one.

The party breaks this flow. It does not accelerate time; it jams it. It is an interruption, a crack in the ordered continuity of days. During a party, time is no longer good for anything: it does not measure, it does not organize, it does not promise. It simply happens. In this sense, the party resembles what Benjamin calls Jetztzeit: a charged, dense present time that does not point toward an after, but plays itself out entirely here. Not because it is truly liberating, but because it suspends, if only for a few hours, the obligation to think of oneself in terms of what is to come. In the party, the future is bracketed — not defeated, but ignored. And in this minimal, almost insignificant gesture, there is a form of resistance: the temporary refusal to live every instant as preparation, as investment, as waiting.

If the party were truly an answer, one would be enough. Instead, they return, chase one another, multiply. Every weekend seems to have to begin again from scratch. Not because the last one has been forgotten, but because it was not enough. The party does not resolve, does not close, does not heal. It works only in the moment in which it happens. And that is precisely why it repeats itself. This is not a failure; it is its nature. We go back looking for it because the void does not disappear, because the future does not stop weighing on us, because the present, on its own, cannot hold for long. Parties resemble one another, blur together, sometimes seem identical. The places change, the faces change, the songs change, but the gesture remains the same: suspend again, stop again, try again. There is no accumulation, no progress. There is only the repetition of a necessary parenthesis. And perhaps this is what best captures our condition: we are not searching for a definitive solution, but for a way to keep staying afloat, night after night.

Jacques Prévert opens a poem titled Fiesta with the line: “And the glasses were empty.” They always become empty. They remain scattered, overturned, forgotten. We drink to fill something that, during the day, remains exposed, difficult to ignore. It is not just exhaustion: it is the emptiness that accumulates from one day to the next, time passing without any clear direction, the future weighing more heavily than it promises. Drinking does not eliminate the void, but it shifts it, makes it less central. It allows us to remain in the present without feeling its full weight. Empty glasses do not only tell the story of what we drank. They remain there as a reminder of how fast everything spins, of how constantly we are asked to do, produce, run. The party is one of the few spaces where you can simply be, let yourself go, and not have to explain anything. It is not about getting lost, it is not just about alcohol. It is about being together without counting, without building, without making every minute useful.

It is a space in which to breathe, even if only briefly. The party always ends there: in front of empty glasses that promise nothing. And yet, for a few hours, they did their job. They made the present inhabitable, the future less threatening, fear less lonely. They built nothing, but they allowed us to remain. And perhaps that is what we are really looking for when we party: not happiness, not a direction, but the possibility of feeling alive without having to explain why. “And I, drunk dead, / was a fire of joy.”