I was skimming my old blog posts and ended up re-reading this old article about Tolstoy going through a sort of midlife crisis. Given the way our friend Nath died, this quote in particular felt poignant:
The third escape is that of strength and energy. It consists in destroying life, when one has understood that it is an evil and an absurdity. A few exceptionally strong and consistent people act so. Having understood the stupidity of the joke that has been played on them, and having understood that it is better to be dead than to be alive, and that it is best of all not to exist, they act accordingly and promptly end this stupid joke, since there are means: a rope round one’s neck, water, a knife to stick into one’s heart, or the trains on the railways; and the number of those of our circle who act in this way becomes greater and greater, and for the most part they act so at the best time of their life, when the strength of their mind is in full bloom and few habits degrading to the mind have as yet been acquired…
Reading through the whole thing I thought Thomas Nagel’s The Absurd is probably a good response to it or at least a place from which to see the types of mistakes he’s making. Tolstoy was in a really bad mood. A long mood for sure but a mood and that was his fundamental problem which led to all this rationalistic churn he couldn't seem to find his way out of rationally.
And that oddly enough brought me back to this Camus quote from the Myth of Sysiphus which hits on the problem nicely:
Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity. A universe—in other words, a metaphysic and an attitude of mind.
The thing is, when you’re feeling good, it doesn’t matter if life is meaningless. And if you’re feeling bad, it doesn’t matter if life is meaningful. What matters is how you feel and you'll take that feeling into your rationalizing (as our Scottish friend likes to say, "reason is the slave of the passions").
And I've rarely had rationalizing get me out of a mood. To get out of my long mood I needed art (flow) and I needed a lot of it. I needed a change of practice.
(If only there was a balm, we could call it mood-be-gone. This is why my psychotherapist aunt is always trying to get people to take drugs.)
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