The Consolation of Pessimism

Without someone to love this world is a desert.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Many loves but no one great Love. Such is the theme of many great (and not-so-great) poems and novels. The imagined or idealized beloved, such as we find in Machen's novel The Hill of Dreams, or in Richard Crashaw's poem Wishes, subtitled "To His (Supposed) Mistress," demonstrate that the mind is the realm of glorious fulfillment, while the 'real' world is the realm of disappointment, frustration, and finally -- despair. Crashaw's poem ends on this poignant note:

Let her full glory,

My fancies, fly before ye;

Be ye my fictions, but her story.

The best of these types of works leave us with a sense of introspective -- and not unpleasant -- sadness; what the older writers called melancholy. The worst leave us despising the writer as a pathetic sap. Yet they point to a universal experience: that of frustrated idealism -- and it is precisely this which produces the pessimist.

The pessimist despises the world (and for the most part, the people in it) because it exists as it is, not as it ought to be. Daily doses of annoyance, disappointment, and occasionally heartbreak lead the pessimist to resign him or herself to the sad fact that the beauteous mind-wrought realm is nowhere to be found. In so-called love, when I give myself to my partner, telling her things I would tell no one else, sharing myself body and "soul" -- when I do this, I am expecting a sort of eternal state of devotion, of shared existence. When the thing falls apart -- and it always does -- nothing is left but what Milton called "Myself, my sepulcher, a moving grave."

The question, then, is: Why persist in misery? in a walking death? One could easily speak of hope and quote Pope's annoying line about that pointless emotion springing eternal, etc. ... I don't believe in hope. One could also speak of the need for human beings to work together for a better world. However, we are all too steeped in our own self-centered misery and false hope to do so. Schopenhauer wrote, in one of his essays, that anyone, at any time, can find someone in a worse state than themselves. But then, he asks rhetorically, "What does this tell us about the state of the whole (of humanity)?" There is no consolation in simply observing the collective misery of human beings. The pessimist must seek consolation elsewhere.

I find my consolation in the fact that there is no hope, and that those who permit themselves to hope are simply sailing blindly towards temporary bliss, perhaps, but certainly to final, absolute destruction. And I do not mean the grave, but the destruction of all joy, however temporary. I have reached a point where I don't seek even petty loves anymore ... I have given up. My consolation lies in the fact that this is the end-point of life, that the sun is setting, and peace will arrive, sooner rather than later.

This does not mean that I am made of stone, and cannot find some joy, or at least quiet admiration, in watching a sunset or walking along the banks of a placid lake. Nor does it mean that I have ceased to enjoy the embraces of a woman. Quite the contrary. It is the fleeting nature of these things that lends them their melancholy poignancy. Every day is not the same; new things are arising all the time, to capture my imagination. In moments of exquisite loss of self, when a new idea is presented to me, or I meet some interesting person, I forget the evanescence of life and its all-too-brief glories. When I drink, I imagine that my bliss will last forever. Of course, it doesn't. In my occasional bouts of religious devotion -- the height of contradiction, as I am, at heart, an atheist -- I am forced to engage in existential or phenomenological interpretations of my experience, when in fact the devotion is merely an outlet for pent-up emotion.

I believe that emotion rules our lives, that rational thought is an ideal to which none (or perhaps very few) has ever lived up to ... Controlled sorrow is the one ruling emotion of everyone's life: the introspective person admits it, while the extraverted one simply, well, persists in his optimistic engagement with this charnel-house of a world. To know that one is doomed to sorrow is the first step on the road to freedom. When one ceases to place faith in anything but the fading light of sunset, then one has gained liberation from the sunlit world of the damned optimist and his ever-fluctuating hopes and dreams.