Reading Beckett, reading Beckett’s reading of Proust, reading the intellectual regress back to Schopenhauer and Kant, I put down the books. I stop.
It comes down to this in human affairs: we know that on the way to dying, we live and experience. Obviously, not only good times, but the odd “peak” experiences, fade: sometimes quietly fragmenting, sometimes catastrophically. We know too that, given the psychological heuristics by which we live, loss figures more greatly than gain. Even in resolving loss, we gravitate to disappointment rather than to learning. Perhaps the smarting is its own reward?
We must work to hold onto the good. It is worth it. Creativity and new forms of play emerge from this. Beckett had a secret. His characters tramped stoically forward, failing better. But he himself was able to consolidate and work through the difficulties and challenges of early adulthood; and further able to channel energies into the triumph of work upon which he built and through which he consistently created. If that is not life lived in implicit optimism, I don’t know what is.
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