From Wemyss' A Severed Wasp: Orwell - Woolf - Kierkegaard, two quotes:
Theodore Dalrymple put it characteristically well in the City Journal a few years ago when he said that, had she survived to our own time, Woolf would have had the satisfaction of observing that her cast of mind - shallow, dishonest, resentful, envious, snobbish, self-absorbed, trivial, philistine, and ultimately brutal - had triumphed among the elites of the Western world. And if that seems a little harsh on someone who did I think have a considerable gift - Mrs Dalloway is surely a very good novel - just remember that she also wrote the most immitigably stupid book of the twentieth century.
It just goes to show that you should look at how people comport themselves towards the world before accepting that they have something worthwhile to say about turning away from it. But the good news is that, when you do look, what you see is not always a disappointment.
You can turn away from the world without a chip on your shoulder, perhaps without even really thinking that that’s what you’re doing. But of course it isn’t as easy as that. Most of us will turn away from the world because it displeases us, and displeasure with the world is usually going to be our own fault. By comparison, turning away from the world in the full bloom of its loveliness is a gift, and no one will grasp it who has not already begun to receive it.
and
But I think I went too far in worrying that even the best philosophical or literary talk about death was always going to be on the edge of vacuity. By comparison, I’d say nowadays that a well-adjusted sense of absurdity and meaninglessness is much more likely to be good practice for the truth of its expression. After all, death does define existence. And the refusal to face up to it - no, that’s wrong, almost everyone “faces up to it”; the real point is to let the thought of it mature over the years - is as good an explanation as any for our tendency to insist on defining ourselves in terms of contingent things, things that are vulnerable to change.
The examples are endless. A violinist can get her fingers crushed. A footballer can lose a leg. A devoted husband can discover that his wife is betraying him. Children grow up and leave home. We don’t always get the top job. All of these things can induce despair. But, according to Kierkegaard, the real despair is about something else. It is about the thought that one is nothing if not a violinist, an athlete, a man loved by his wife, a mother whose children still need her, someone moving successfully up the career ladder, and so on.
Tracked: Nov 16, 11:16