“There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote as he reckoned with the rudiments of happiness. “We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. This is what governs us,” artist Maira Kalman observed in her illustrated chronicle of the pursuit of happiness.

To accept that there can be no happiness without despair is to recognize that, rather than a malady of the spirit, despair is the rudder course-correcting the ship of the self, steering it from the actual to the ideal.

That is what Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explores in his characteristically grimly titled and characteristically deeply insightful 1849 book The Sickness Unto Death (public library), so radical in some of its ideas that he published it under a pseudonym.

Illustration by Margaret C. Cook for a rare 1913 edition of Leaves of Grass. (Available as a print.)

For Kierkegaard, the spirt and the self are one and despair is a sickness in them — one exposing the gap between the self that is, the self that keeps us small, and the self that can be, the vast eternal self of full potentiation. With an eye to this spiritual sickness, he writes:

The self is a relation which relates to itself… A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity… A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self.

[…]

Despair is the imbalance in a relation of synthesis, in a relation which relates to itself.

Considering the disruption of the self’s relation to itself as the root of despair, he traces the inner machinery of how it sets in:

If a person in despair is, as he thinks, aware of his despair and doesn’t refer to it mindlessly as something that happens to him… and wants now on his own, all on his own, and with all his might to remove the despair, then he is still in despair and through all his seeming effort only works himself all the more deeply into a deeper despair. The imbalance in despair is not a simple imbalance but an imbalance in a relation that relates to itself and which is established by something else. So the lack of balance in that for-itself relationship also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power which established it.

This then is the formula which describes the state of the self when despair is completely eradicated: in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it.

One of teenage artist Virginia Frances Sterrett’s 1920 illustrations for old French fairy tales. (Available as a print.)

Kierkegaard observes that, on the surface, you always feel yourself despairing over something. But beneath that is really the self’s relation to that something, fomenting a desire to rid yourself of your self in order to expunge the negative feeling — which, Kierkegaard cautions, is an existential impossibility and, as such, sunders the spirit with despair:

The relation to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed the relation to oneself… With despair a fire takes hold in something that cannot burn, or cannot be burned up — the self… To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.

And yet in this very impossibility lies the life-affirming aspect of despair — it asserts our relation to the eternal. Having devoted his life to bridging the ephemeral and the eternal, Kierkegaard writes:

Despair is an aspect of spirit, it has to do with the eternal in a person. But the eternal is something he cannot be rid of, not in all eternity.

[…]

If there were nothing eternal in a man, he would simply be unable to despair… Having a self, being a self, is the greatest, the infinite, concession that has been made to man, but also eternity’s claim on him.

Complement with May Sarton on the cure for despair and a remedy for it from Gabriel Marcel and Nick Cave, then revisit Kierkegaard on how to save yourself, our greatest source of unhappiness (and what to do about it), and the only true cure for our existential emptiness.

In many ancient creation myths, everything was born of a great cosmic ocean with no beginning and no end, lapping matter and spirit into life. In the cosmogony of classical physics, a partial differential equation known as the wave equation describes how water waves ripple the ocean, how seismic waves ripple rock, how gravitational waves ripple the fabric of spacetime. In quantum physics, a probability amplitude known as the wave function describes the behavior and properties of particles at the quantum scale. Virginia Woolf described the relationship between consciousness and creativity as “a wave in the mind.”

Waves lap at the bedrock of being, beyond the scale of atoms, beyond the scale of stars, to wash up something elemental about what this is and what we are.

This dialogue between the elemental and the existential comes alive in a splendid poem by the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson (January 2, 1960–May 19, 1999), composed as she was dying in the prime of life, included in her superb posthumous collection A Responsibility to Awe (public library), and read here by Amanda Palmer to the sound of “Optimist” by Zoë Keating:

SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE OCEAN AND THE UNIVERSE
by Rebecca Elson

If the ocean is like the universe
Then waves are stars.

If space is like the ocean,
Then matter is the waves,
Dictating the rise and fall
Of floating things.

If being is like ocean
We are waves,
Swelling, traveling, breaking
On some shore.

If ocean is like universe then waves
Are the dark wells of gravity
Where stars will grow.

All waves run shorewards
But there is no centre to the ocean
Where they all arise.

Couple with Rachel Carson on the ocean and the meaning of life, then revisit Elson’s poems “Antidotes to Fear of Death,” “Theories of Everything,” “Explaining Relativity,” and “Let There Always Be Light (Searching for Dark Matter).”

It starts with a tremble in the stomach, a palpitation in the chest. You may call it intuition, premonition, foreboding. You may press it down with the firm fist of rationalism. And yet it persists, this flutter of feeling — this haunting sense that the future is not about to happen to you, but is already happening in you.

For all the marvels and flaws of our intuition, we expend immense cerebral and emotional energy on repressing these emissaries of our secret knowledge — these deep truths we perceive about ourselves and others, which we would rather not see and not heed in order to keep the surface of our lives unruffled. It is only in hindsight that we recognize their sharp validity, so blunted in the moment by our compulsive rationalizations, our comforting denials, and our willful blindness.

That is what Javier Marías (September 20, 1951–September 11, 2022) explores in some stunning passages from his 2002 novel Your Face Tomorrow (public library).

Art by Olivier Tallec from Big Wolf & Little Wolf

Considering how hindsight often gives us the clear sense that “everything was already there, somewhere, before it even reached or penetrated the mind,” Marías writes in one of his breathless streams of reckoning:

Everything is there on view, in fact, everything is visible very early on in a relationship just as it is in all honest, straightforward stories, you just have to look to see it, one single moment encapsulates the germ of many years to come, of almost our whole history — one grave, pregnant moment — and if we want to we can see it and, in broad terms, read it, there are not that many possible variations, the signs rarely deceive if we know how to read their meanings, if you are prepared to do so — but it is so difficult and can prove catastrophic; one day you spot an unmistakable gesture, see an unequivocal reaction, hear a tone of voice that says much and presages still more, although you also hear the sound of someone biting their tongue — too late; you feel on the back of your neck the nature or propensity of a look when that look knows itself to be invisible and protected and safe, so many are involuntary; you notice sweetness and impatience, you detect hidden intentions that are never entirely hidden, or unconscious intentions before they become conscious to the person who should be concealing them, sometimes you foresee what someone will do before that person has foreseen or known or even become aware of what this will be, and you can sense the betrayal as yet unformulated and the scorn as yet unfelt; and the feelings of irritation you provoke, the weariness you cause or the loathing you inspire, or perhaps the opposite, which is not necessarily any better: the unconditional love they feel for us, the other person’s ridiculously high hopes, their devotion, their eagerness to please and to prove themselves essential to us in order to supplant us later on and thus become who we are; and the need to possess, the illusions built up, the determination of someone to be or to stay by your side, or to win your heart, the crazed, irrational loyalty; you notice when there is real enthusiasm and when there is only flattery and when it is mixed (because nothing is pure), you know who isn’t trustworthy and who is ambitious and who has no scruples and who would walk over your dead body having first run you down, you know who has a candid soul and what will happen to these last when you meet them, the fate that awaits them if they don’t mend their ways, but grow still worse and even if they do mend their ways: you know if they will be your victims When you are introduced to a couple, married or not, you see who will one day abandon whom and you see this at once, as soon as you say hello, or, at least, by the end of the evening. You detect too when something is going wrong or falling apart, or flips right over and the tables are turned, when everything is collapsing, at what moment we stop loving as we once did or they stop loving us, who will or will not go to bed with us, and when a friend will discover his own envy, or, rather, decide to give in to it and allow himself to be led and guided from that moment on by envy alone; when it starts to ooze out or grow heavy with resentment; we know what it is about us that exasperates and infuriates and what condemns us, what we should have said, but did not, or what we should have kept silent about, but did not, why it is that suddenly one day they look at us with different eyes — dark or angry eyes: they already bear a grudge — when we disappoint or when we irritate because we do not as yet disappoint and so do not provide the desired excuse for our dismissal; we know the kind gesture that is suddenly no longer bearable and that signals the precise hour when we will become utterly and irredeemably unbearable; and we know, too, who is going to love us, until death and beyond and, much to our regret sometimes, beyond their death or mine or both… against our will sometimes… But no one wants to see anything and so hardly anyone ever sees what is there before them, what awaits us or will befall us sooner or later.

Art by Harry Clarke from Tales of Mystery and Imagination. (Available as a print.)

With a gauntlet thrown at the reductionist bias of the Western mind and its hasty dismissal of such uncomputable forms of knowledge, he adds:

This has nothing to do with premonitions, there is nothing supernatural or mysterious about it, what’s mysterious is that we pay no heed to it. And the explanation must be a simple one, since it is something shared by so many: it is simply that we know, but hate knowing; we cannot bear to see.

For an equally stirring counterpoint, couple with George Saunders on the courage of uncertainty, then revisit E.F. Schumacher on the notion of adaequatio and the art of seeing with the eye of the heart.

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