Bukowski vs. Weil

Dr. Vallicella contrasts two seekers of deep experience: writer/poet Charles Bukowski the dissolute drinker and Simone Weil, a teacher/activist/thinker who became something of a religious mystic in her later years; she lived to be only 34. Bukowski died at 73. 

Vallicella writes:

Both refused to live conventionally, the Laureate of Low Life and the Red Virgin. Both said No to the bourgeois life. But their styles of refusal were diametrically opposed. Both sought a truer and realer life, one by descent, the other by ascent. For one the true life, far from the ideological sham of church and state and family values, is the low life: drinking, gambling, fornicating, drug-taking, petty crime like busting up a room and skipping out on the rent, barroom brawling. Not armed robbery, rape, and murder, but two-bit thievery, whoring and picking fights in dingy dives. Nothing that gets you sent to San Quentin or Sing-Sing.

For the other, the true life is not so readily accessible: it is the life in pursuit of the Higher, the existence and nature of which is only glimpsed now and again. (Gravity and Grace, 11) The succor of the Glimpse—this is indeed the perfect word—is unreliable, a matter of grace. One is granted a glimpse. A matter of grace, not gravity. It is hard to rise, easy to fall—into the the bed of sloth, the whore's arms, the bottle. The pleasures of the flesh are as reliable as anything in this world.

Ersatz depth of experience at the bottom of a bottle, or real depth of experience through renunciation and self-discipline? I know neither, and I know people with backward priorities who'd happily reverse "ersatz" and" real."