This Is Us

The Last Essay

Late-night thoughts on whether life is worth living

This is a late-night essay: the kind of thoughts you have lying awake in the early morning hours; the conversations you have between midnight and last call. I want to talk to you about something that’s been on my conscience. Maybe you can help me think it through. Or not. Then we’ll finish these beers and go.

Late last night I was reflecting, as I often do these days, that life really might not be worth living after all, and I wondered whether my writing were not essentially dishonest. There’s a rough template for an essay in my mind — half-conscious, not very critically examined — not unlike the tonal arc of Romantic symphonies or the mix tapes we used to make: things may get dark and hopeless in the middle, but you leave the reader on an up note, something hopeful and life-affirming. This is true for political op-eds as well as personal essays. First the writer identifies a problem; then they propose a solution: diagnosis; cure. The latter, prescriptive sections of such op-eds are characterized by a peculiar rhetorical tic: the writer resorts to the word must, as in: “Congress must act to restore the integrity of U.S. elections,” “The President must hold Russia accountable,” or ”governments must get serious about greenhouse gas reductions” (a random sampling). In almost all such cases, the word must can be easily and accurately replaced with the word won’t.

It’s hard to keep up a plausible pose of optimism these days, for myself personally, and for the nation and the world. You don’t need me to enumerate the litany of unpromising news; there’s a persuasive case to be made for despair. I spend at least as much time feeling despairing as hopeful — a lot more, really — so why do I feel this obligation to impersonate a wise person, offer the reader reassurance and encouragement, send them back out there with a little pep talk I only half-believe myself? Who am I to afflict the impressionable young with a false sense of possibility? It’s as if it’s a public service I’m expected to render in exchange for the reader’s attention, the way a crime writer has to give you a compelling plot about justice being served to keep you interested while he does his more important work: showing you how irredeemably unjust our world really is.

It would be fair to say that for every hopeful, life-affirming thing I’ve ever written there is an at least equally valid pessimistic, misanthropic retort.

Maybe I ought to start writing more essays that end on a downer, advocating despair, the way old Equal Time laws required networks to give airtime to opposing points of view. William F. Buckley once said, in an introduction to one of his books, “for almost everything that is said here, there is an opposite, if intellectually unequal, reaction set down somewhere.” He was incorrect about his rotten ideology, but it would be fair to say that for every hopeful, life-affirming thing I’ve ever written there is an at least equally valid pessimistic, misanthropic retort. I will die unhappy and alone. Our civilization is in irreversible decline. Humanity is doomed to imminent exinction. The End.

It’s not as if I never examine the darker aspects of our existence in my essays, but I tend to squirrel it tactfully away in the middle somewhere, the same way that, as a teacher, I try to sandwich criticisms inconspicuously between compliments. But I could as easily do the opposite: begin in despondency, offer the reader a glimmer of hope, then quash it and leave them fucked. Structure in writing is more arbitrary than readers imagine. Really it’s all in the syntax. E.g.:

“I finally fucked Lydia, but I got gonorrhea.”

“I got gonorrhea, but I finally fucked Lydia!”

Both sentences convey the same information, but with different emotional valences. (I personally can’t help but admire the second speaker.) So many of our judgments are syntactical: we weigh recent events more heavily than older ones, and regard what happened last as though it were a verdict. (“Call no man happy until he is dead.” –Herotodus) If someone dies forgotten and alone, does it negate a whole life of accolades and laughter? If he’s hailed as a genius decades after his death, does it redeem a life spent in obscurity and poverty? If democracy collapses in America, is the whole experiment a failure?

You form this bias, as a brainy, brooding adolescent, that anyone who’s happy must be an idiot. (“A psychotic is a guy who’s just found out what’s going on,” quipped that lover of humanity and celebrant of life William S. Burroughs.) If you’re lucky, you’ve grown up sheltered from some of the uglier realities of life, and once you start to become cognizant of it, any art that’s dark and misanthropic seems inherently more honest, better, than art that’s affirming and humanistic. You want art that rips the façade off the world, that mocks and tears down and dances on the grave of corrupt human institutions and their hollow values. In The Sunset Limited, a play about the question of whether life is worth living, Cormac McCarthy writes: “When you read the history of the world you are reading a saga of bloodshed and greed and folly the import of which is impossible to ignore.” McCarthy tactfully leaves that import unspoken, but jovial misanthrope H.L. Mencken cheerfully came out with it: “The world is a botch.”

This teen nihilism turns out to be sort of a luxury form of despair; once you have to start dealing with the world’s relentless quotidian bullshit on your own you can no longer afford it, anymore than a cyclist in rush hour midtown traffic can pause to ask himself where he’s going again and is it really all that important after all. In midlife, some of the living writers I admire most are unsentimental optimists — an unfashionable thing to be in literary circles these days. Writers like science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson and my fellow essayist Rebecca Solnit both hover, like stern cartoon angels, over my shoulders whenever I presume to write about politics, lest I give in to bitterness or cynicism. “It took an effort to be optimistic, it was a moral position,” Robinson writes in his novel Antarctica. Rebecca Solnit has no patience for what she calls “naive cynicism”: “Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement,” she writes, “pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting.” These admirable attitudes do not come easily to me; to some extent, I have to fake them. But who knows? Maybe Robinson and Solnit are too. Maybe we’re all faking it for each other, in hopes of making it retroactively have been true.

My friend Annie is an antinatalist, a philosophical position that argues that bringing a new person into the world is an essentially immoral act — and not because the human population has such a catastrophic impact on the environment or biosphere, but because it is cruel to the child conceived; life, they hold, is, on balance, a drag, and inflicting it on an unsuspecting soul unconscionable. They agree with Silenus’ assessment: the best thing is never to have been born. It’s a philosophical position predicated on the tenets of utilitarianism: that the Good can be determined as a ratio of pleasure : suffering. I suppose if you were to crunch the numbers by percentage of time spent happy vs. un-, life probably does net out as a bad experience. But some fleeting moments in my life have been worth innumerable hours of boredom. I’m not an anti-natalist myself; I didn’t have kids only because it looked boring at best. Maybe my own calculus of utilitarianism involves interest rather than pleasure; I just personally find it’s more interesting to exist than not. (I know this is a tautology: the dead aren’t bored, they just aren’t.) “Life isn’t fair,” writes William Goldman in what’s secretly my favorite book ever written, The Princess Bride. “It’s just fairer than death, that’s all.”

Back when I was a cartoonist, I constantly bitched about it and threatened to quit, and my colleague Lauren would always call my bluff: “What else are ya gonna do?” It’s as good an answer as any to my existential doubts. Basically, I’m a complainer. But complaining isn’t an argument against life; it’s a way to get through it. I guess, since I keep sticking around — even if I’m sitting on the arm of the sofa with my coat on — I have to admit I’m at least 51% committed to this thing, Life. We all vote with our feet: if we’re still aboveground, we’re counted as Yeas, however halfhearted; we evidently believe it’s worth it to get up again and go through the motions one more day, Sisyphus gamely giving it another go, thinking this time’s gonna be the one. Of course we only ever hear from the Yeas, since those are the only people still around; those who vote Nay, by default, abstain. So we tend not to feel the weight of the accumulate tacit vote of no confidence constituted by all the suicides, junkies, dropouts, and hermits — everyone who looked at what life had to offer and said, yeah thanks, but no. These are desperate times, and anyone who’s not on Team Life — who thinks that life is pain and humanity is a cancer and the world will be better off without us — should probably shut up and get out of the way. The people I don’t quite understand or trust are those who’ve never had to question whether it’s all worth it; the ones I like are those who’ve had to struggle with the question, to wrestle with angels — the same way I don’t trust people who never really got why drinking was supposed to be fun, but like and respect those who found it so much fun they had to quit or it would’ve killed them.

Periodic, survivable doses of despair are medicinal, like inoculations.

A few nights ago my friend Margot called to try to cheer me — to remind me that, although things are admittedly not good on any front right now, they wouldn’t be that way forever — which I found touching, since I know very well that cheer is no more Margot’s default disposition than it is mine and she’s barely hanging in there herself. Maybe it’s just everyone’s job to take turns offering each other encouragement, to give each other the chance to break down and give vent to all our sorrow and hopelessness, staggering our episodes of despair so that humanity doesn’t all give up at the same time. I don’t believe that artists have any particular responsibility, except not to bore their audience, but, speaking just for myself, I think that literature ought to try to help. Nietzsche ultimately valued truths less for their veracity than their utility; his standard was whether a truth promoted life, health, growth, strength, joy. Even gloomy gusses like Cormac McCarthy (or Burroughs, or Beckett, or our other great nay-sayers) help, in their way, by acknowledging the direness of our condition, and expressing it grandly and savagely. Periodic, survivable doses of despair are medicinal, like inoculations. Nietzsche also said: “The thought of suicide is a powerful comfort; it gets one through many a bad night.”

Let’s pretend it’s late now, long after midnight. The party’s over; it’s down to just you and me. An essay has to end somewhere, but we both know that any ending is always arbitrary. I could end this one by concluding that life is worth living after all. Or by deciding it isn’t. Obviously, neither is “true”; they both are. I’ll keep going back and forth between them long after the essay is over: yes, no; life, death; hope, despair. (She loves me, she loves me not. She loves me — ) You can choose whichever one you want to believe. The only thing is, choosing the latter is the end of the conversation; choosing the former means it’s not over yet. It’s all in the syntax. Tell you what: let’s have just one more round, and then that will be it.