Philosophical Balm for Troubled Times / Features / Untitled Books

At university, I felt a confused longing to write, but couldn’t imagine what sort of writer to be.

Philosophical Balm for Troubled Times

ALAIN DE BOTTON, author of The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, champions those pessimistic philosophers who relish the banalities of life and embrace its imperfections.

We tend to imagine that cheering people up involves saying happy things. But Seneca says the saddest things and strangely enough, he is very consoling.

I wouldn't have become the writer I am if I hadn't, in my early 20s, discovered the work of the French academic and essayist Roland Barthes. At university, I felt a confused longing to write, but couldn't imagine what sort of writer to be: nothing I'd yet come across seemed to provide the model that could offer me the courage to begin. I wasn't interested enough in novels, I couldn't tell 'a story', and the non-fiction I knew either had an off-puttingly impersonal, staid quality or else - in the case of memoirs - lacked the intellectual backbone I needed.

Then I discovered a Frenchman who showed me a new way of writing non-fiction. Roland Barthes's most famous book, Mythologies, is all about the most ordinary things - washing powder, the Eiffel Tower, falling in love, short and long-hemmed skirts, photographs of his mother - and yet he brought a classical education and a philosophical mind to bear on these subjects. He knew how to connect Racine and beach holidays, Freud and the anticipation of a lover's phone call. His work rejected the division between the high and the low and, like so many modern artists, he could see the deeper themes running through supposedly banal things.

Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave might have been well-known in British literary life twenty-five years ago, but no one under the age of 35 seems to have heard of it. It's usually out of print, and is often compared unfavourably with Connolly's far-better known Enemies of Promise. The accusation most often levelled at it is that it is a work of self-indulgence - an accusation that fails to distinguish between talking a lot about yourself (which can be very entertaining), and being self-centred (which never is). Connolly did a lot of the former, but without being the latter. The book is a seductive mixture of diary, common-place book, essay, travelogue and memoir, all arranged in loose paragraphs in which Connolly gives us his views on women, religion, death, seduction, infatuation and literature. The thoughts are wise, dark, and beautifully modelled, with the balance of the best French aphorisms. Here are some examples from Connolly:

"There is no fury like an ex-wife searching for a new lover,"

"No one over thirty-five is worth meeting who has not something to teach us - something more than we could learn from ourselves, from a book."

The charm of the work lies in the narrator's mischievous, melancholy tone as he shifts between the sublime and the banal:

"To sit late in a restaurant (especially when one has to pay the bill) is particularly conducive to angst, which does not affect us after snacks taken in an armchair with a book. Angst is an awareness of the waste of our time and ability, such as may be witnessed among people kept waiting by a hairdresser."

In The Essays, Montaigne likes to point out that philosophers don't know everything, and that they would be a lot wiser if they laughed at themselves a little more. He also writes in a personal and often very frank way designed to shock the prudish.

"Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies," he says. "Even on the highest throne in the world, we are seated still upon our arses."

It's time to recognise how odd and counter-productive is the optimism on which we have grown up. For the last two hundred years, despite occasional shocks, the Western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. But on a broader historical perspective, this optimism is a grave anomaly. Humans have spent the greater part of existence drawing a curious comfort from expecting the worst.

Seneca belonged to the Stoic school of philosophy, which is all about teaching you how to respond calmly to disaster. We tend to imagine that cheering people up involves saying happy things. But Seneca says the saddest things and strangely enough, he is very consoling. "What need is there to weep over parts of life?" he asks, "The whole of it calls for tears." Given the times we live in, Seneca should be the author of the hour. In a time of continuous political upheaval (with Nero on the Imperial throne), Seneca interpreted philosophy as a discipline to keep us calm against a backdrop of continuous danger. His consolation was of the stiffest, darkest sort:

"You say: 'I did not think it would happen.' Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?"

Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them - in AD62 - that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become.

If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden calamity and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across decades, on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today, and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This Goddess can scatter gifts and then, with terrifying speed, watch us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear under an apartment building.

Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything , we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. "There is nothing which Fortune does not dare". No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs or say goodbye to a friend without an awareness - which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic - of fatal possibilities.

Given our technological prowess, we think of ourselves as controlling our destiny. Man doesn't any longer have to be a plaything of random forces and with the application of reason, all our problems may be solved. Nothing could be further from a Stoic mindset. We must, stressed Seneca, expand our sense of what may at any time go wrong in our lives:

"Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile."

Arthur Schopenhauer is another great pessimist who makes you feel happier. He pointed out that all humans find it easy to imagine perfection, but that it is a problem to suppose that such perfection can ever occur on earth. Nothing human can ever be free of blemishes. We have tended to cast such gloomy messages aside. The modern bourgeois philosophy pins its hopes firmly on those two great presumed ingredients of happiness - love and work. But there is a vast unthinking cruelty discreetly coiled within this magnanimous assurance that everyone will discover satisfaction here. It isn't that these two entities are invariably incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost never do so. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes - instead of seeming to us quasi-inevitable aspects of life - will weigh down on us like particular curses. In denying the natural place reserved for longing and incompleteness in the human lot, the bourgeois ideology denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages, our unexploited ambitions and our exploded portfolios, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to make more of ourselves. We should instead remember the great pessimistic voices of history. There's a quote from Schopenhauer I particularly love: