“Yeh, OK, fine, but what good does it do?”
My friend was not rebuking. We were comparing, as friends may after an absence, our progress through time: “catching up” is the curious phrase, as if life were a race. We were both doing “fine” – still with our health, family, means, work we prize – “no complaints.” Naturally humans always have complaints – we’re uniquely, I think, the kvetching creature – but none we dare mention lest we attract God’s attention and invite His wrath. (We are also, uniquely, the superstitious creature.) We really were “fine” – knock wood – at an age when many aren’t. No tears here!
And yet (we’re also the and-yetting animal), notwithstanding our good fortune, we were grim, drab, we woke with dread. The world seemed in bad shape and getting worse; America was unhappy, misguided, at each other’s throats. Our climate was deteriorating at a rate that might make earth uninhabitable in our grandchildren’s lifetimes. People were unpleasant. And our work, albeit unobjectionable, even honorable, was hardly arresting this alarming slide. We were OK, fine, but what good were we doing? Tugged toward a cataract by a resistless tide, was there any good to be done?
Pessimism, for me, is a new experience. I have always been hopeful, cheery, convinced of my utility to my kind. Whatever my job at the moment, I was saving the world. Journalists are peculiarly prone to this delusion. Ours may not be the most remunerative profession, but, hey, “the truth shall set you free,” how cool is that!
The last seven years have ground my mood to mud. Personally, I’ve never been happier – in love, unshackled of responsibilities, free to “do my thing”. In Jane, grandkids, you guys, now Henry, I feel I’ve won the lottery, lucked out, been rewarded beyond my desert (stress on the second syllable. My life was never a desert. English can be tricky that way). Hallelujah’s my only conscionable response – so yes, hallelujah, and then some.
And yet… What if humanity is nearing its extinction – by its own fool fault? What if, like feckless heirs, we’re squandering our munificent inheritance, despoiling our habitat, tormenting and terminating each other in our insatiable greed? The dinosaurs, best we know, were not responsible for their annihilation. What if humans, in terms of achievement the cleverest species ever, were precipitating our own demise – and soon!?
Oh, oh, oh – and what can we do about it? “After such knowledge,” in T.S. Eliot’s words, “what forgiveness?”
I hesitate to touch this topic. Who wants Jeremiah with breakfast? Yeh, shit may be coming down, we all may be goners, but let me sip my jo in peace! We must temper our truth to our hearers’ tolerance. “Humankind,” to ransack Eliot again, “cannot bear very much reality.”
I’d prefer to be “the life of the party.” That’s what my mother trained me for, to keep it light and brighten others’ hours. We embrace humorists and recoil from grouches; my intent is to make you smile.
The way to deal with pessimism, I’ve decided, is to soft-peddle it: never lie – that would betray our trust – but mask it, if possible, in gaiety. Recently I reread Boccaccio’s Decameron, often characterized as the first novel. A group of beautiful, privileged, fluttering young Florentines flee the calamitous Plague in their city to beguile what may be their final hours with flirtations, songs, and silly tales. Let’s make the best of today – that’s the thick book’s moral – because we can’t save our neighbors and tomorrow we may all be dust.
I mean to make my words dance, even in the dumps.