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. It seems there are one of two
options: either speak to this situation, or remain silent. The writer’s
failure is that they know they should choose the latter, but cannot help
attempting the former. Writers (and readers . . . when there are
readers . . . ) console themselves by naming this failure: an apology, a
confession, a testimony, a treatise, a history, a biography, a life.
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. There
are, then, two paths. Ultimately writers dream of taking neither path,
leaving all paths for the forest. But it’s just a dream.
The patron saints of pessimism watch over our suffering. Laconic and
sullen, they never seem to do a good job at protecting, interceding, or
advocating for those who suffer. Perhaps they need us more than we need
them. There are patron saints of philosophy, but their stories are not
happy ones.
Even 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 . . . 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. Grumpy old Beckett. ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-patron-saints-of-pessimism-a-writers-pantheon/
[Emil Cioran, Michel de Montaigne, Friedrich Nietzsche werden in dem Beitrag behandelt]
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