(Ill. 20.7)
She says that the fucking Lufthansa flight has been delayed, that she will try to get a seat on another airline but that he shouldn’t wait. There follows a pause before the worst is confirmed. Things are a little complicated in her life right now really, she goes on, she doesn’t quite know what she wants, but she knows she needs space and some time, and if it is all right with him, she will be the one to call once her head is a little clearer.
1. The philosopher might have offered unflattering explanations of why we fall in love, but there was consolation for rejection – the consolation of knowing that our pain is normal. We should not feel confused by the enormity of the upset that can ensue from only a few days of hope. It would be unreasonable if a force powerful enough to push us towards child-rearing could – if it failed in its aim – vanish without devastation. Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine. To be shocked at how deeply rejection hurts is to ignore what acceptance involves. We must never allow our suffering to be compounded by suggestions that there is something odd in suffering so deeply. There would be something amiss if we didn’t.
2. What is more, we are not inherently unlovable. There is nothing wrong with us
per se
. Our characters are not repellent, nor our faces abhorrent. The union collapsed because we were unfit to produce a balanced child
with one particular person
. There is no need to hate ourselves. One day we will come across someone who can find us wonderful and who will feel exceptionally natural and open with us (because our chin and their chin make a desirable combination from the will-to-life’s point of view).
3. We should in time learn to forgive our rejectors. The break-up was not their choice. In every clumsy attempt by one person to inform another that they need more space or time, that they are reluctant to commit or are afraid of intimacy, the rejector is striving to intellectualize an essentially unconscious negative
verdict formulated by the will-to-life. Their reason may have had an appreciation of our qualities, their will-to-life did not and told them so in a way that brooked no argument – by draining them of sexual interest in us. If they were seduced away by people less intelligent than we are, we should not condemn them for shallowness. We should remember, as Schopenhauer explains, that:
What is looked for in marriage is not intellectual entertainment, but the procreation of children.
4. We should respect the edict from nature against procreation that every rejection contains, as we might respect a flash of lightning or a lava flow – an event terrible but mightier than ourselves. We should draw consolation from the thought that a lack of love:
between a man and a woman is the announcement that what they might produce would only be a badly organized, unhappy being, wanting in harmony in itself.
We might have been happy with our beloved, but nature was not – a greater reason to surrender our grip on love.
For a time, the man is beset by melancholy. At the weekend, he takes a walk in Battersea Park, and sits on a bench overlooking the Thames. He has with him a paperback edition of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, first published in Leipzig in 1774.
(Ill. 20.8)
There are couples pushing prams and leading young children by the hand. A little girl in a blue dress covered in chocolate, points up to a plane descending towards Heathrow. ‘Daddy, is God in there?’ she asks, but Daddy is in a hurry and in a mood, and picks her up and says he doesn’t know, as though he had been asked for directions. A four-year-old boy drives his tricycle into a shrub and wails for his mother, who has just shut her eyes on a rug spread on a tattered patch of grass. She requests that her husband assist the child. He gruffly replies that it is her turn. She snaps that it is his. He says nothing. She says he’s crap and stands up. An elderly couple on an adjacent bench silently share an egg-and-cress sandwich.
1. Schopenhauer asks us not to be surprised by the misery. We should not ask for a point to being alive, in a couple or a parent.
2. There were many works of natural science in Schopenhauer’s library – among them William Kirby and William Spence’s
Introduction to Entomology
, François Huber’s
Des Abeilles
and Cadet de Vaux’s
De la taupe, de ses moeurs, de ses habitudes et des moyens de la détruire
. The philosopher read of ants, beetles, bees, flies, grasshoppers, moles and migratory birds, and observed, with compassion and puzzlement, how all these creatures displayed an ardent, senseless commitment to life. He felt particular sympathy for the mole, a stunted monstrosity dwelling in damp narrow corridors, who rarely saw the light of day and whose offspring looked like gelatinous worms – but who still did everything in its power to survive and perpetuate itself:
To dig strenuously with its enormous shovel-paws is the business of its whole life; permanent night surrounds it; it has its embryo eyes merely to avoid the light … what does it attain by this course of life that is full of trouble and devoid of pleasure?… The cares and troubles of life are out of all proportion to the yield or profit from it.
Every creature on earth seemed to Schopenhauer to be equally committed to an equally meaningless existence:
Contemplate the restless industry of wretched little ants … the life of most insects is nothing but a restless labour for preparing nourishment and dwelling for the future offspring that will come from their eggs. After the offspring have consumed the nourishment and have turned into the chrysalis stage, they enter into life merely to begin the same task again from the beginning … we cannot help but ask what comes of all of this … there is nothing to show but the satisfaction of hunger and sexual passion, and … a little momentary gratification … now and then, between … endless needs and exertions.
(
Ill. 20.9
)
3. The philosopher did not have to spell out the parallels. We pursue love affairs, chat in cafés with prospective partners and have children, with as much choice in the matter as moles and ants – and are rarely any happier.
(
Ill. 20.10
)
(
Ill. 20.11
)
4. He did not mean to depress us, rather to free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It is consoling, when love has let
us down, to hear that happiness was never part of the plan. The darkest thinkers may, paradoxically, be the most cheering:
There is only one inborn error, and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy … So long as we persist in this inborn error … the world seems to us full of contradictions. For at every step, in great things and small, we are bound to experience that the world and life are certainly not arranged for the purpose of maintaining a happy existence … hence the countenances of almost all elderly persons wear the expression of what is called
disappointment