'Put Out Their Eyes When It Was Dark'

“The man who is both happy and an optimist is an imbecile.” 

Happiness has always felt like the byproduct of life properly lived, not a goal unto itself. If I “behave” – live up to my own standards, not exaggerate my importance, pay minute attention to my conscience, respect others when they deserve it and occasionally when they don’t – I can settle for “happiness.” I define it not as bliss but as ease, a sort of momentary relaxation of vigilance. It doesn’t have a lot to do with getting my way and I can’t usually blame others when “unhappiness” creeps in.

 

The late Terry Teachout rather charmingly characterized himself (and H.L. Mencken, about whom he wrote a biography) as an “ebullient pessimist,” and I promptly adopted the description as my own, though I’m certainly less ebullient than Terry. In defiance of the customary understanding of “pessimist,” there was nothing gloomy or grim about him. He was a regular guy, fabulously learned, hard-working, seemingly undefeated by life’s inevitable troubles. His company was always energizing, even via the internet. My wife and I had lunch with him here in Houston in 2018, when he signed my copy of Pops, his biography of Louis Armstrong, “in honor of a special day.”

 

I’m skeptical of people who casually declare themselves “optimists.” I’m reminded of the character of Imlac in Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas:

 

“The state of a mind oppressed with a sudden calamity . . . is like that of the fabulous inhabitants of the new-created earth, who, when the first night came upon them, supposed that day would never return. When the clouds of sorrow gather over us, we see nothing beyond them, nor can imagine how they will be dispelled: yet a new day succeeded the night, and sorrow is never long without a dawn of ease. But they who restrain themselves from receiving comfort do as the savages would have done, had they put out their eyes when it was dark."

 

There is, in other words, something profoundly self-centered about optimism, a sense that if I don’t get my way I’ve been cheated. How unfair the world is. The sentence at the top was written by Jules Renard in his Journal on July 30, 1903. I think of Renard not as a doomsayer but a pragmatic, rough-and-tumble realist, with the sensibility of a farmer.  

 

[The Renard passage is taken from Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]