On Despair: It’s All a Charade

Despair is almost indescribably excruciating; if you can describe it, you must not be knowing it. Furthermore, it’s pathetic and embarrassing, which adds to the difficulty. The condition precludes any but mechanical action; even mental activity within it is minimal and repetitive. A writer can only gingerly pull up an abyss-flap and steal a glimpse, for art’s sake. (Are we despair yet?)

For me despair is a blot in which anything that could be felt as a path either goes nowhere or is trivially circular, the way the universe is curved, so that there’s no way out, only an elliptical looping ... (It’s said that the ellipse is the most common shape in the universe.) Life is radically circumscribed, and much is impossible to know: not difficult, but impossible, and always will be. The experience is of purest helplessness and hopelessness. (And those who would deride one as weak for succumbing were also born with their own temperamental “weaknesses.”) Think of the guilt of death camp survivors, nth level despair. As much as anything that guilt comes from knowing that one’s own survival had nothing to do with virtue, and one’s susceptibility to suicide also follows from having been exposed for months and years to the infinite cruelty of ordinary people, not excluding oneself.

For me, despair, to the best of my recollection, results typically from finding that my foundational assumptions, even ones so deep as to not be conscious prior, are illusory, incorrect: meaningless delusions. It’s disorienting to the extent of the concept of the abyss, an infinite location that is unlocated, within which the absence of orientation is so complete as to undermine existence altogether. One realizes not only that there’s no meaning, but also no possibility of comprehension of the simplest phenomenon. We’ll never know anything; we’ll only be manipulated by our petty, strained predilections and illusions, and this abysmal stasis is the most complete comprehension of reality of which one is capable, the deepest profundity one can ever know.

A great poem that treats this condition, or a variety of it, is the sixteen-line “To Himself,” by Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837), as translated by Jonathan Galassi, which begins:

Now you’ll rest forever,
worn-out heart. The ultimate illusion
that I thought was eternal died. It died.
I see not just the hope
but the desire for loved illusions
is done for us. Be still forever.

Despair is the most private form of unhappiness. Talking about it, to the extent possible, unlike most negative emotions, doesn’t dispel or dilute it whatsoever, but only annoys and bores a listener and shames and embarrasses the speaker. It’s a tradition in Christianity that despair is the only sin that is not forgiven. It’s a special province of poets possibly because it’s so private and damning.

The renowned neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in a letter to Mike Warvarovsky dated May 25, 1969:

Neurophysiology shows what poetry and philosophy have always known: that we are—in a very fundamental sense—automata, reflex-machines; and also that we are composite. Knowing that we are necessarily passive and composite, we can then make ourselves, for daily purposes, active and unified. But there is no “soul” and no “will”—these are fictions, universal fictions, like the Garden of Eden.

Somehow these realizations didn’t seem to dent Sacks’s beautiful cheer, or generous performance of cheer, but being a puppet can be depressing.

All of our struggles not only fail to stamp us on the universe, they’re dictated by the universe. We’re merely the local link in that chain that’s “conscious.” It’s all a charade. The “I” is a fiction. And so is everyone you “love.” They’re merely experience processors more or less compatible with oneself. Even many of our various mental, psychological, and physical systems are practically independent of each other (we’re “composite”) and often thereby seemingly inconsistent. There’s no one there.

When I was young, I wondered why I seemed to be more sad than other people, more hopeless. I think the feelings were mostly of loss and of inadequacy. My father died suddenly when I was seven, and I always rejected the thought, now and then ventured by my sister or mother or someone, that his death had some unrecognized, damaging effect on me. I resented the suggestion that I was subject to that kind of random alteration from without. But I’ve long since understood that temperament is largely biological and involuntarily learned: “reflexive,” as Sacks put it. We’re puppets, and nature is indifferent to us.

I recently underwent an episode of despair. It was triggered by a set of ordinary occurrences within a few days that added up to completely confusing me about where I stood in relation to people I respected and had thought respected me. At least I think that’s what it was. I lay in bed in the dark in the middle of the night desperately trying to work my way out of this hole, mentally writhing beside my sleeping girlfriend. I remember wishing I could scream. I don’t know how long I internally groaned and twisted there before something surprising happened. It occurred to me that my girlfriend and I could have sex. She was warm and smelled good and she welcomed being touched by me. Sex solves everything, I thought, amazed. Good sex does. We “made” “love.” All my problems disappeared. How depressing is that?