"It is possible to create an art where destruction and violence serve as their own ends, but it is irresponsible, and betrays both the impulse and its origins.
Yet so much of the world is like this today, isn't it?
A second impression of hopelessness came this morning with an article in the New York Times about veterans from the war in Afghanistan committing suicide. Each one of them, after their combat experience, was overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness and a lack of meaning. The presumed threat of our mortality — which is imparted to us because of an unspoken assumption that it is somehow unnatural — brings hopelessness very close to home. It's easy to believe that because everything is temporary, nothing means anything. And it is at this time of year, when the fall air begins to blow in, that that brilliant gasp of autumn which illuminates the coming end of summer sinks into the bones. One can sense it in the very marrow; summer will die. Yet it is exhilarating, filled with promise, not desperate and bleak. So there is the possibility for us to sense hope even within the end of things, if we understand life properly. There are those who can draw strength from such ideas; and our arts, literature, music, philosophy and sciences should help us to absorb these lessons. When they serve the opposite purpose, they do not serve man — they serve his devils.
There ought to be a nobility of substance in our enterprises, don't you think? A way of seeing, sensing that transcends — an effort to incorporate mortality, not dismiss it. If we bury death itself, we lose what makes us live with it. This is a question we need to carry within us always."
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I think the point is, we come up against hopelessness in terms of scale; we come up against hopelessness in terms of time; viewed through this constricted lens, the whole world could, easily, be construed as a meaningless exercise.
That is the easy way out. Men reach for desperation and bitterness, I think, out of selfishness itself — we are tempted to drink it like hemlock and then lie back and let everything expire. Now, it's true, that there are clinically depressive conditions that may do this to individuals, but there is no excuse for doing it as a culture -...."
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