The Tonic of Nihilism

This morning I found myself thinking about a poem by A.E. Housman, a translation from Sophocles that begins: "What man is he that yearneth for length unmeasured of days?" It's an extremely bleak poem, even nihilistic, one that is based on the "wisdom of Silenus" theme.

Put simply, Silenus was a Greek companion of Dionysius who, when a human enquirer asked him what the happiest fate for humans was, answered: "Never to be born, and failing that, to die quickly."

The Sophocles poem that Housman translates has also been translated by Yeats, and is even more savage in this version:

Never to have lived is best, ancient writers say;
Never to have drawn the breath of life, never to have looked into the eye of day;
The second best's a gay goodnight and quickly turn away.

As most people will know, A.E. Housman's poems are full of this sort of nihilism. An epicurean college don who died of a good old age, he wrote many an ode celebrating the death of young men on the battlefield. Surprisingly, his poems were very popular in the trenches of World War One

What puzzles me is that this is the sort of thing I should hate. Although I'm of a melancholy temperament, my outlook is very much pro-life in the most fundamental sense. I think life is a good thing, a good beyond all words. I agree with Chesterton:

There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, and that under all our rumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. That light of the positive is the business of the poets, because they see all things in the light of it more than do other men.

I believe this with all my heart. And yet, there is also a certain truth to this bleak, uncompromising verse of Philip Larkin, "Wants":

Beyond all this, the wish to be alone:
However the sky grows dark with invitation-cards
However we follow the printed directions of sex
However the family is photographed under the flag-staff -
Beyond all this, the wish to be alone.

Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs:
Despite the artful tensions of the calendar,
The life insurance, the tabled fertility rites,
The costly aversion of the eyes away from death -
Beneath it all, the desire for oblivion runs.

Another example are the works of Samuel Beckett. As much as I dislike modernism, and especially the bleaker aspects of modernism, there's something in Beckett that draws me. Perhaps it's a sort of relief to have come to the very bottom. There's certainly a stark beauty in his plays (and even in photographs of the man himself).

My own view is that this sort of nihilism, occasionally indulged in, is a healthy tonic-- as long as we remember it's just a tonic. Life is wonderful and precious beyond all words, but it's also full of pain and suffering and grief. Every now and again, articulating the deepest darkness of life-- as the Bible itself does in Ecclesiastes-- is warranted, I think. Only to return once again to the light of gratitude and joy and affirmation.

Here is the whole of the Housman poem:

What man is he that yearneth
For length unmeasured of days?
Folly mine eye discerneth
Encompassing all his ways.
For years over-running the measure
Small change thee in evil wise:
Grief draweth nigh thee; and pleasure,
Behold it is hid from thine eyes.
This to their wage have they
Which overlive their day.
And He that looseth from labor
Doth one with other befriend,
Whom bride nor bridesmen attend,
Song, nor sound of the tabor,
Death, that maketh an end.

Thy portion esteem I highest,
Who was not even begot;
Thine next, being born who diest
And straightway again art not.
With follies light as the feather
Doth Youth to man befall;
Then evils gather together,
There wants not one of them all-
Wrath, envy, discord, strife,
The sword that seeketh life.
And sealing the sum of trouble
Doth tottering Age draw nigh,
Whom friends and kinsfolk fly,
Age, upon whom redouble
All sorrows under the sky.

This man, as me, even so,
Have the evil days overtaken;
And like as a cape sea-shaken
With tempest at earth's last verges
And shock of all winds that blow,
His head the seas of woe,
The thunders of awful surges
Ruining overflow;
Blown from the fall of even,
Blown from the dayspring forth,
Blown from the noon in heaven,
Blown from night and the North.