: ) The bright side!

Night before last, I attended the bachelor party of a friend and regular reader. After he got good and drunk he told me, in so many words, that Trickgnosis is rather…grim. A bit bleak. A little gloomy. Now I can’t really argue with that. But he implied that perhaps this was a little…unbalanced.

My first thought was that this was spoken like someone surrounded by friends, riding a wave of good cheer and Jameson, and about to marry someone he loved. In other words, things were looking pretty good for him. And I don’t begrudge him that. When life takes an occasional break from kicking us in the ass, it is indeed to be celebrated for as long as it lasts. But I feel compelled to defend my outlook on the world. It is true that I have a hard time ignoring all the banal evil, the senseless brutality and the ubiquitous suffering the world has to offer. Clearly, I do not shop enough. Or maybe I need to put those books down and start watching some more television.

William James made a distinction between two types of character he referred to as “the healthy minded” and “the sick soul.” The healthy minded are those fortunate enough to be born with a happy, easygoing disposition. The sick soul, on the other hand, is…rather grim, a bit bleak, a little gloomy. The cheerful-by-nature most likely lead happier, more fulfilling lives, but, according to James, they are just a bit out of touch with reality:

The systematic cultivation of healthy-mindedness as a religious attitude is therefore consonant with important currents in human nature, and is anything but absurd. In fact, we all do cultivate it more or less, even when our professed theology should in consistency forbid it. We divert our attention from disease and death as much as we can; and the slaughter-houses and indecencies without end on which our life is founded are huddled out of sight and never mentioned, so that the world we recognize officially in literature and in society is a poetic fiction far handsomer and cleaner and better than the world that really is.

In our culture today our fictions are no longer even very poetic. Damn that was grim. Give me a minute, I’ll get the hang of this mindless good cheer eventually. James himself did his best to be a cheerful sort, but he thought that acknowledging the realities of the world was a philosophical necessity:

It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience, and that its survey is the one that overlaps. The method of averting one's attention from evil, and living simply in the light of good is splendid as long as it will work. It will work with many persons; it will work far more generally than most of us are ready to suppose; and within the sphere of its successful operation there is nothing to be said against it as a religious solution. But it breaks down impotently as soon as melancholy comes; and even though one be quite free from melancholy one's self, there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth...

So I’m not going to run out and join the optimist’s club. However, in the interest of balance, I will try to pay more attention to those things in life that I take secret delight in: friends, family, music, literature. But keep an eye on me and sound the alarm in the event I start sounding too cheerful. Living too long "in the light of good" has been shown to cause cancer.