TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (March 13, 2025):
Three years before he vowed, in “Carrion Comfort”, not to feast on despair, the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins grieved the physical decay of growing old: “And wisdom is early to despair: / Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done / … So be beginning, be beginning to despair”. We age, decline and die, like everyone we love.
Yet despair is not, to put it mildly, a popular stance. In his “Sonnets of Desolation”, Hopkins fought against it; and the poem that bids us despair was paired with verse consoled by “beauty’s self and beauty’s giver”, God. Forced to choose between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, the well-adjusted opt for optimistic hope.
PESSIMISM, QUIETISM AND NATURE AS REFUGE by David E. Cooper
HOPEFUL PESSIMISM by Mara van der Lugt
Two recent books take issue with this upbeat orientation. Both defend pessimism, though to very different ends. Their arguments are timely. The past ten years have made it hard to be optimistic about humanity. We’ve squandered our best chance to confront the coming climate chaos – storms, droughts and famines that will mean suffering on a massive scale – and the looming crises of forced migration and resource scarcity have spawned reactionary nationalism, not solidarity. In the US, democracy is under threat. The damage will be difficult to repair: it’s easier to wreck trust and infrastructure than to build them up.