So I confine myself, somewhat arbitrarily, to pessimist “philosophers,” dubious though this distinction is. All that remains are singular, anomalous statements, a litany of quotes and citations crammed into arborous fortune cookies read by no one. In the end it’s overwhelming all of literature becomes a candidate. even the great pessimist stand-up comedians). The list quickly expands, soon encompassing the entirety of literature itself, and beyond (. from Goethe’s sorrowful Werther, to Dostoevsky’s burrowing creature, to Pessoa’s disquiet scribbler Baudelaire’s spleen and ennui the mystical pessimism of Huysmans and Strindberg the stark and unhuman lyricism of Meng Jiao, Georg Trakl, Xavier Villarrutia the frenetic obfuscations of Sakutaro Hagiwara, Ladislav Klíma, Fyodor Sologub the haunted and scintillating prose of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, Izumi Kyōka, Clarice Lispector the misanthropic rigor of Lautréamont’s Maldoror or of Bonaventura’s Nightwatches the crumbling of reason in Artaud’s The Umbilicus of Limbo or Unica Zürn’s The House of Illnesses. There are patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not happy ones.Įven in cases where the entire corpus of an author is pessimistic, the project always seems incomplete, as if there was still one more thing to say, one last indictment. Perhaps they need us more than we need them. Laconic and sullen, they never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or advocating for those who suffer. The patron saints of pessimism watch over our suffering.
Ultimately writers dream of taking neither path, leaving all paths for the forest. But the continual accumulation of that-which-cannot-be-put-into-words always points back to this one basic realization-that, when it comes to human beings, silence is the most adequate form of expression. ) console themselves by naming this failure: an apology, a confession, a testimony, a treatise, a history, a biography, a life. The writer’s failure is that they know they should choose the latter, but cannot help attempting the former. It seems there are one of two options: either speak to this situation, or remain silent. If all is for naught, then why bother writing it down? Caught in a vicious circle, ensnared in the logical absurdities of awkward self-awareness.
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