Why did Nietzsche, who denounced the nazarene faith for its baseness and decadence, not applaud the dark history which its oversensitive defenders now wince at, its unholy annals of a proud feudal coterie exercising its unpitying sovereignty in the name of a God of mercy and love? Might he not have seen a profane providence in the barren cross blossoming into
ferocious violence and unmatched fecundity? The christian state was the leopard that lay down with the kid and devoured it. The prince of peace has ruled over a realm of mayhem and death.
Secular humanism has tamed and gelded our kind far more effectually than his cult could have done.
‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’ What vitality could be hoped for from a sect whose sole sacred tree was a dead plank on which a man was hanged? Christianity gave us a few eunuchs, eremites, masochists, fantasists and fanatics. The church gave us Giotto, Dante, Michelangelo, Piero della Francesca. The sole fruitful thing in christianity has been its
crookedness, perversity and idolatry. It peevishly damned the world, but the world indulgently forgave and redeemed it. The church has served as the most trustworthy prophylactic to
counteract the contagion of faith. It preserved the west from the pale galilean. The Lord showed his care for his fold by sending his church to neuter the christian faith. Then Luther uprooted the prodigal hypocrisy of Rome, and tried to resow the parochial and arid deceits of Nazareth.
Even the most ethereal and austere religion is perpetuated by its paganism, which pays due homage to the multitude of divinities by its multitude of rites. It lives by its dark or gaudy carnality and by its profane superstitions, which are fleshly, local, tribal and enchanted. Like poetry, the gods spring from the soil, and then ascend to the pale firmament. Men and women are such born pagans, that in order to become good pagans, all they need do is follow nature, obey authority, revere the old ways and take part in the rites. But the christian faith so outrages our unspoiled instincts, that it could do no more than bind them to capitulate to an attenuated paganism and follow nature, obey authority, revere the old ways and take part in the rites. But it has now grown so virtuously modern, that it has ceased to be vigorously heathen. The church
spent the first half of the twentieth century vainly calumniating the modern world, and the second half vainly truckling to it.
The bright gods were all the things that we don’t dare to be, mercurial, uncaring, caustic, exigent, partial, irresponsible, playful, mischievous. The primordial divinities, more fortunate than Tithonus or the sibyl, were blest with unfading youth, but spared everlasting life. They were too strong to be of help to our feebleness, and so we let them expire. Good gods die young, before they have time to grow old and bitter and putrid.
When the one Lord withdrew into petulant transcendence, what was left to entrance the world but sin? Jesus seldom communed with seraphim, but he was fretted by legions of devils.
We have done our best to drive the savage and the sacred from the earth, and to cram it with the tame and safe. The terrifying angels have been domesticated as chubby dimpled cherubs to sell chocolate.
Art and paganism enchant the world but don’t claim to transcend it. The christian faith sought to transcend it and so profaned its sacred awe and magic. It hewed down the groves, banished the nymphs and the great god Pan, threw down the altars and upturned the hearths, sealed the temples, and dispersed the household spirits. With its maudlin man-god it was destined from the beginning to sink into a decrepit and self-applauding humanism. First the one God killed the rest of the gods, and then the son of man usurped the place of his father. When the one true God took on human form, it was inevitable that humanity would appropriate the place of the one true god. When Jesus told us that the sabbath was made for man and not man for the sabbath, it was goodbye to all true piety. The mortal animal has grown or shrunk to a baffled god,
distracted by joy, or dazed by woe, lost amid the wreckage made by its all-powerful prostheses.
The gods helped to demystify the green world by emptying it of the old spirits. They were indispensable aides in our enlightenment and disenchantment.
To swap theism for the cult of humanity is to exchange a god of imagination for the idol of our self-admiration. Human beings can’t help believing that individually and collectively they are the finest things in creation.
The cult of Jesus was the kitsch of judaism. The church was a plaster paganism. Each
embalmed a crude version of creeds and forms whose meaning and majesty they had long lost.
And now they have dwindled to the kitsch of themselves. Religion used to provide the poetry of ordinary people’s lives. Now it makes its doggerel. If Bach’s music was a strong proof that there is a God, then contemporary liturgy is a strong clue that he is dead.
Living rites freeze sentimentality, but moribund ones reheat it and dish it up as a spongy nostalgia. The superannuated gods are doomed to spend their twilight years not in a glorious Valhalla, but as pantomime extras in a tasteless Disneyland. Heaven is the attic in which we stash our christmas trinkets and the rest of the kitsch of brotherly love and all the rewards that we hope to get for it.
We frame our faith out of what we don’t know but believe. For how could we bear to frame it out of what we know but don’t dare hold to, our utter inconsequence and the certainty of our
extinction and the immeasurable universe with its billions of cold galaxies that care nothing for us?
HAPPINESS
1 Unhappiness
How much untold woe we bring on our heads in the hope of making ourselves happy one day.
We are paddling madly to reach contentment, but all we do is churn the river of our misery to a more turbid froth and surge. We live in a frenzy, and die unconsoled.
What a long conglomeration of small sorrows our short lives have space for.
Happiness tastes so bland, that we keep spooning into it the spice of expectant desire, till we end up spoiling it. Though we stock all the ingredients to make a rich happiness, we brew up a foul stew of misery. We are thrust on by an unquenchable thirst for joy and by an ineradicable propensity for reducing plain gladness to seething grimness. Even fools are clever enough to make their lives simply wretched.
We’re just poised to reach the pinnacle of joy, and we’re trembling on the verge of a precipitous crash. It’s all about to come together at last, and it’s all on the point of falling apart.
Most of us never find peace, since the plain pleasures which we enjoy don’t satisfy us, and yet we don’t enjoy prosecuting the more serious career which we trust will meet all our needs. What makes life unendurable alone makes us endure it. We are harassed by the selfsame wants and hopes that we live for. And so we pay with our happiness to get what we deem we could not be happy if we lacked. Like moody Ahab, we are ‘damned in the midst of paradise.’ We long for peace, and we are all the time conducting this one last push to secure it, while fighting to fend off the death that will give it to us.
We are fools for improvement. We feel that life is no good if it’s not continually getting better.
We have to race so frantically to make life better, how could we find the time simply to live well?
If there are things that we could easily do to benefit ourselves but we aren’t doing now, we can be sure that we never will do them, since we have no wish to.
Some people need the courage to combat unrelenting misery, since they lack the resolve to retreat from the routines that have caused them such harm. We are addicted to misery, but we soon lose the frail habit of happiness.
For the damned in hell each day is the same, and yet every morning they wake to a fresh horror.
There must be an infinite number of cells in the underworld to house the infinite states of torment that we have laid up for ourselves.
When others suffer from the same cause as me, I take heart that there was no way I could have dodged my suffering. And when they suffer from a divergent one, I brag how dexterously I have kept clear of their blunders.
Just when you trust that you have tamed life, it bares its fangs, and snarls, and shows you once more that it is a wolf and not a fawning cur.
Your misery may lurk for years in remission, but it will never be cured. It may break out years afterward in a violent attack, and kill you in a few weeks. This life ends so soon, and yet, as Van Gogh wrote, ‘there is no end to anguish.’ But most of us have the luck to succumb to some timely malady, before our real sadness gets the chance to snuff us out.
Life is either just bearable, or not. And it makes all the difference whether you know that you can bear it for one day more, or that you can’t bear it for so long as that.
You never know in what hell people might be burning, but often neither do they.
Pleasure seems so bright in anticipation, but so pale in possession. Joy ravishes you in prospect, dejection molests you in the present. Our expectancy has already sucked the juice from our pleasures before we reach them, and it leaves our experience nothing but their dry bones to pick over. We are far more present for our pains than we are for our pleasures. Your fantasies doom you to stalk fictitious gratifications, but won’t take your mind off your real pains. I chase joys, but they fly me. And creeping sorrows catch me, though I fly them. Anguish arrests you in the jangling now. Lust beckons you on to meet the shining future. The only people who live wholly for the moment are those that are wrung by agonizing pangs. If you are forced to live in the moment all you want to do is get out of it. Absorption in the here and now is a luxury praised by those who have something more enjoyable to do. Most of us have good reason not to live for the present hour.
Our bliss melts in the heat of our embrace.
Our world of instant gratification is by the same token a world of indefinite deferral. We can’t wait for anything, not even the bliss that we are in the midst of. We’re always charging off after some new pleasure which we hope will give us all we want. Our desires are self-defeating, since they no sooner transport us to some joy than they drag us out of it to chase some new quarry.
Life is a book that you can’t bear to put down, no matter how bad it gets. Who would choose to take it up? Yet who can dare to lay it aside, once they’ve been entrusted with the loathsome gift? Life is a poor thing to gain, but a great thing to lose.
Life lures us on like someone whom we have ceased to love but still can’t help lusting after. The world breaks your heart, but won’t snap the straps of hope and desire that keep you pinioned to it.
Our love of life is a case of Stockholm syndrome.
Life pays some people such starvation wages, why don’t they just quit? Though churlishly dissatisfied with the most opulent life, we still cling to the most beggarly one. The worse it gets, the tighter I hold on to it. On good days one feels almost strong enough to shuck off the burden of life. On bad days one is too discouraged to dare so much as that. ‘Man alone,’ wrote
Tocqueville, ‘displays an inborn contempt of existence yet a boundless rage to exist. He scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.’ What mendicants we are, that all we have is life. And what misers we are, that all we want to do is hang on to it. To have eaten all that dirt, and still find life so sweet. We need to have the heart to go on, since we lack the nerve to give up. We can’t let go of the cheapest things, but we get rid of the most precious ones in a twinkling. Our fingers have to be prised from the gimcrack bauble which we clasp as if it were a priceless heirloom.
The most starved of us find life so fresh and delectable, and hug so lovingly the thorns which lacerate us so bloodily. We promenade like great proprietors in a city in which we are paupers.
‘All of us are beggars here,’ as William James points out.
How sad to be leaving a world in which all that we loved has long since left us. How hard to let go of this life which our miseries have made so hard to bear.
Those who have lost all that they had still dread to lose the life that took it from them. And those who have got nothing are sure that a year or a day more will bring them all that they long for.
We have no choice but to stay in the game, the losers in the hope of recouping what they’ve lost, the victors to win yet more and to reap the fruits of what they’ve won. Even the dying are still in love with the world which is killing them. Those who seem stoical in enduring the pangs that are sure to end in death may just be too attached to life to let it go. Life is the great swindle.
It gives us nothing that we want, but keeps us hanging on for its least prize.
Most people can’t see how dark the world is, since it’s lit up so brightly for them by their own beaming self-belief.
Each new blow at least makes us forget how badly off we were before.
Earth’s atmosphere must contain some impalpable element, so favourable to life, so hostile to happiness. ‘Who would have thought that life could be so sad?’ asked Van Gogh out of the depths.
Life shows us so little pity, that we have to hope that death will show us some mercy. But would life treat us so untenderly, if it didn’t know how callous we are?
‘No man should be afraid to die,’ says Fuller, ‘who hath understood what it is to live.’ Life is such an atrocious scene, that the exit from it had to be festooned with terrors, to dissuade us from departing it. Dying had to be made so hard, because being dead is so easy. The part of death that is part of life is, like the rest of life, rugged and bitter. But the part that belongs all to death is kind and full of comfort. Death is more tender with us than we are with ourselves. It draws us gently into its welcome ocean, when we would hold back shivering and frightened on the edge.
But when did we ever know what was good for us? Death, which knows nothing, knows our own good better than we do. We shun it, as a rabid dog shuns water. Why do we look for a saviour to deliver us from death, when death will come as our one sweet redeemer, to ransom us from the hell that we have made of this life? ‘We all labour against our own cure,’ as Browne wrote,
‘for death is the cure of all diseases.’ We fight to put off what will free us, and fly to meet what will make us its slave. We love life and hate death, yet death gives us all that we need, while life doesn’t give us a thing that we want.
Immortality would be as harrowing as an unabated insomnia. One sleepless night ought to cure anyone of the yearning for eternity. Life has played us such filthy tricks, we may well fear that death won’t be the last of them. Since this life is hell, it might stretch out till the crack of doom.
We may wake to find that the nightmare will have no cease. The thought that it won’t go on for ever is all that could keep a sane person going.
Death, like most good things, comes too late for many of us, but at least it does come.
To live is to play chess blindfold against a grandmaster who has not lost a game, and can change or break the rules at will, and makes three moves for your one.
We can’t see what’s in store for us, but we can be sure that it won’t be good. Even while we sleep, some indifferent doom is preparing the catastrophe that will flatten us. ‘I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet, yet trouble came.’
When you feel heartsick, even your dear familiar places seem smeared with a mildew of stale misery.
Try to run from your troubles, and you will have to strain all your muscle to lug them with you.
You scent the sadness behind the gladdest and shiniest things, you feel it on the most brilliant and tranquil days, you taste it in the pastness of the past and in the otherness of other people’s lives.
We have all been coached to read our life as a plot, and we know that every plot is preordained to come to a gratifying close. Since all our stories are about ourselves, we can’t stand any that don’t have a happy ending.
How we curse the smugness of those who are as happy as we were till yesterday. And how we
How we curse the smugness of those who are as happy as we were till yesterday. And how we