A Good-Natured Pessimist

It is easy to become a pessimist these days.  I am trying hard not to become one by reading Mark Twain—one of the great pessimists.

Mark Twain wrote about the “The Nightmare of History” before the end of the 19th century.  He had come to a place where he began to think that the brotherhood of man (community) was unattainable; that man’s desire for power was stronger than his desire for love; that selfishness, not altruism, determined human actions.  His historical vision was a cyclical one, similar to the view held by Henry Adams and others of his time. 

Twain saw the history of mankind as a nightmare, a nightmare of repetitious events—endlessly repeating itself—“mankind struggling out of ignorance and slavery to gain freedom and knowledge, only to be led by its own cowardice and greed into fooling away its chances and being returned to its chains.”  He wrote in his notebook in 1867:  “Fame is a vapor—popularity an accident—the only earthly certainty oblivion.”  

Mark Twain was not only a pessimist in terms of world history, but also wrote about the nightmare side of his own personal history.  He saw his own history as a “foolish dream” in which he himself had arrived at a place of desolation:  “Old Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the worshippers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but You, center of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek and asking Yourself ‘would you do it again if you had the chance?’”

How did such a pessimist ever become a great humorist (“the greatest humorist this country has ever produced”)—one who made people laugh at the world’s shenanigans and their own?  Perhaps some of his own comments about humor will help us understand:

“Humor is a great thing, the saving thing after all.  The minute it crops up, all our hardnesses yield, all our irritations, and resentments flit away, and a sunny spirit takes their place.”

“Humor is the good-natured side of truth.”  

I’m trying, as hard as I can, to avoid being a pessimist, but if I end up being a pessimist, I want  to be a good-natured one.