Melancholic Joy

On Life Worth Living

Brian Treanor

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350177765
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Today, we find ourselves surrounded by numerous reasons to despair, from loneliness, suffering and death at an individual level to societal alienation, oppression, sectarian conflict and war. No honest assessment of life can take place without facing up to these facts and it is not surprising that more and more people are beginning to suspect that the human story will end in tragedy. However, this focus on despair does not paint a complete and accurate picture of reality, which is also inflected with beauty and goodness. Working with examples from poetry and literature, including Virginia Woolf and Jack Gilbert and the films of Terrence Malick, Melancholic Joy offers an honest assessment of the human condition. It unflinchingly acknowledges the everyday frustrations and extraordinary horrors that generate despair and argues that the appropriate response is to take up joy again, not in an attempt to ignore or dismiss evil, but rather as part of a "melancholic joy" that accepts the mystery of a world both beautiful and brutal.

Chapter 1

Sadness Will Last Forever¹

1. We perish, each alone

“We perished… each alone.”² Mr. Ramsey, the melancholic metaphysician of Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, repeats these lines from William Cowper’s poem The Castaway while en route to the novel’s eponymous seaside beacon. Moments later he completes the thought with the final lines, “But I beneath the rougher sea / Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he,” both twisting the blade of his own distress and, arguably, wallowing in a kind of self-absorbed pity that is blind to the sufferings and fears of others. It would be easy, and perhaps not inappropriate, to read this as a manifestation of Ramsey’s aching need for sympathy, which is highlighted in his interactions with Ms. Ramsey and Lily Briscoe in the preceding pages of the novel. But while we may be justified in cringing at Ramsey’s acute neediness—his daughter Cam is “outraged” at his self-absorption—I’m not sure that the sentiment itself is to blame.

We perish, each alone.

This we suspect is the terrifying, fundamental existential reality with which each of us must, eventually, grapple. In the end, night falls absolutely, ushering in an unending nothingness; and each of us must tread the final steps of that path alone—right up until the path itself dissolves beneath our feet, precisely because all possibilities come to an end for us. Of course, rationally we know that all others face this same fate and suffer a similar loss. And emotionally we may well come to view the “ultimate necessity”³ of nothingness in the lives of others as even more offensive than it is in our own. Gabriel Marcel claimed that the ultimate tragedy is not my own death, but the death of those that I love.⁴ However, even if we recognize that every death is a tragic loss and that every other in distress is worth saving, and even if we would voluntarily sacrifice ourselves rather than allow our loved ones to perish, it remains the case that each one of us knows best precisely what will be lost when we die.

As Jim Moore observes, the most disturbing element of death is not the fact that I will die, but rather that, when I die, certain manifestations of love and appreciation will die with me.⁵ The point is not that Moore, or I, or you love “better” than anyone else, but rather that the particularities of our love will be lost with us: my “secret spots” in the Sierra Nevada, where I rarely encounter other people despite the stellar climbing and good camping, right next to a fine swimming hole; the rain on the window in my favorite carrel at the library; how the alpenglow on interlaced ribbons of rock and ice on the Chamonix Aiguilles reminds me of Hopkins’s “dappled things… adazzle, dim”⁶; the day the green flash ignited the winter horizon at Zeros as I sat on my surfboard in the cold water; the way my wife curls against my back in the too-small bed from our undergraduate days, which we’ve never bothered to replace; how my daughters casually nestled together while reading on the couch in the evening, like somnolent bear cubs in a hibernation den. “No one knows that but me, / No one knows how to love the way I do.”⁷

Death and nothingness are an offense, in part, because every death is the loss of an entire world—constellations of love and intimacy, imagination and meaning, hopes and dreams. I know my world, my love, more intimately than any other; and I am horrified at the loss of that world and that love as much as by any cessation of my own being or projects.

2. The woeful nature of reality

Today we find ourselves faced with all the traditional reasons to despair: loneliness, fallibility, impotence, loss, tragedy, senselessness, death, and the like. For many people, these reasons to despair are exacerbated by either the modern disenchantment of the world, a postmodern suspicion regarding grand narratives, or both. And, piled on top of this, the news of the day seems to sound a relentless drumbeat of woe. In the last decade we have seen countless novel reasons to despair: seemingly endless wars in the Middle East; the rise of the so-called “Islamic State” and the atrocities it committed; the heart-wrenching plight of refugees, and the callous indifference of many governments and people to their plight; diseases both novel and resurgent: the worst outbreak of Ebola on record, as well as the emergence of H5N1 flu, MERS, and COVID-19, the full effects of which are unclear as I write;⁸ an alarming increase in antibiotic-resistant pathogens, which could knock medicine a step or two back toward the Middle Ages; resurgent xenophobia, misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia, and other forms of hatred in the public sphere; widening economic inequality; accelerating nuclear proliferation; the threat of another global economic downturn; increasing anthropogenic climate chaos; and more. The list, full of dire problems both chronic and acute, seems endless. Today, perhaps more than ever, reality seems to “counsel despair”⁹ and, consequently, “in the deepest heart of all of us there is a corner in which [we suspect that] the ultimate mystery of things works out sadly.”¹⁰

2.1 J’ai mal¹¹

On reflection, there appears to be little reason for optimism or joy at the individual level. Much of life is taken up with the banal and stifling routine of securing one’s daily bread: paying the rent and bills; battling traffic; enduring meaningless work at an office indistinguishable from millions of other offices; grappling with faceless bureaucracies (political or commercial) as we navigate our social belonging; and other similarly unfulfilling drudgeries. Against any fleeting moments of pleasure punctuating the doldrums, we must weigh the fact that every life is also punctuated by moments of fear, experiences of acute loneliness, no small measure of anxiety, the ultimate insignificance of our most cherished projects, countless losses and failures, as well as psychological and physical suffering. And, to put an exclamation point to the issue—or perhaps just an ellipsis, trailing off into nothingness—in the end death has the last word, not only for us but for everyone and everything we love as well. It’s true that psychological defense mechanisms like selective memory and attention can help us to accommodate ourselves to such depressing fare; but that does not do away with it or get around its omnipresence. Much of life is boring, all of our lives involve suffering, and everyone dies.¹²

After the “death of God” proclaimed by Nietzsche and others, some philosophers found refuge in the idea of freedom and creativity. However, it turns out our very freedom may be in large part illusory. Our actions and opinions are shaped, often profoundly, by forces outside our conscious control—biology, psychology, cultural precedents and social mores, individual history, and environment—indicating that we are not quite as free as we generally suppose (consider the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment). We do not live, but are rather lived by “some murmuring non-entity both shadowy and muddled.”¹³ Is it any wonder that in order to cope, most of us are, most of the time, hedonistic egoists, whether that hedonism is expressed through indulgence (some quasi-Huxleyan “soma”), in obsession with the trivialities (Ivan Ilyich’s obsession with whist), or, more commonly, relentless and conspicuous acquisition in a consumer society.

Such egoism is not innocent; more than being neglectful, it often harms others directly. For those of us in the global north, our everyday egoism is likely to perpetuate obscene economic and environmental injustice. Not only do we shut the door on the widow, orphan, and stranger, our bourgeois pleasures are predicated on their continued alienation and suffering. Our demand for ever cheaper consumer goods is satisfied only because those goods are often produced by people in substandard working conditions in jurisdictions with no environmental oversight.

And despite this self-centered focus on ourselves and our projects, we accomplish nothing that endures; all our efforts are imperfect, incomplete, and impermanent, which leads to regret. We like to pretend we are special, that no one has ever lived, or laughed, or loved as we have. But the truth is, most of us are completely, forgettably ordinary. I’m no Shakespeare, and neither are you. Unlike Plato, no one will be reading my books 2,500 years from now. It’s likely that, outside of a tax record or some other random bit of bureaucratic information stored on whatever information system we use in the future, no one will remember me more than a single generation after I die. And, even were that not true, it wouldn’t matter. On a long enough time horizon, it’s all lost. Michelangelo, Socrates, Buddha, the builders of the pyramids, the anonymous artists of Lascaux—all mere blips on the geological clock. Like the dinosaurs or our common protozoic ancestors, dust we, and all our works, are; and to dust we, and all our works, will return.

Adding insult to injury, before death we suffer. As Oscar Wilde put it: “the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything.”¹⁴ As I write this, my own body may harbor the malignancy that will kill me and, even if that’s not yet the case, it is inevitable, both for me and, much worse, for everyone I love. Consider as well the viciously interlocking teleologies of different life forms, the parasitism and predation to which all life is subject.¹⁵ Some accounts suggest that over half the forms of life on Earth are engaged in parasitism.¹⁶ Nature, including humanity, consuming and being consumed: a carnivorous, incessantly grinding Mobius loop, like Satan’s jaws as they eternally masticate Judas, Brutus, and Cassius in Dante’s Divina Commedia. Reality “red of tooth and claw” indeed.¹⁷

2.2 The abattoir of history

Collectively we’re no better off. For while it is true that things can improve, it is also the case that such examples of progress are distributed very unevenly, that progress in some areas is entirely compatible with decline in others, and that the very idea of “progress” misunderstands how culture, science, and evolution itself unfold.

True, there have been remarkable advances—technologically, socially, even morally—over the course of human history. We’ve decreased poverty, eliminated certain diseases, increased human life expectancy, walked on the moon, peered to the edges of the observable universe, and puzzled out the conditions at the origin of the cosmos. More, we’ve made strides, uneven to be sure, on moral and ethical issues, improving—although not fully se...