What is the most pessimistic line in all of literature? I’m too lazy to look, so permit me to quote from my own insubstantial portfolio. In...
What is the most pessimistic line in all of literature? I’m too lazy to look, so permit me to quote from my own insubstantial portfolio. In a discarded part of my novel Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction, Ib – the titular protagonist – observes: “Everything that is alive is a reminder of everything that is dead.”
Ib is a world-class pessimist, and, although it is difficult to reduce a novel to one thing (if it isn’t, it’s not a very good novel), Ib’s Endless Search for Satisfaction is on the whole a pessimistic novel.
The title is almost self-explanatory: It is about a young man’s search for meaning. But he’s not actively searching, nor does he know that this search is the unconscious motivation for his wandering. He feels it only as a vague dissatisfaction, an absence of meaning, and a sense of purposelessness.
I’m not a great fan of my own work and it is not to boast or to market that I bring it up now. Rather, the theme of the book, a search for meaning, seems suddenly to have become more relevant in the last six months of this pandemic, and, to complement this, a feeling of pessimism has become the ruling...
