The Luxuriantly Dark and Moody Thoughts of Youth

When I was 21, I copied the following quote in a notebook; I just ran across it again. It is by Andre Gide, from "The Counterfeiters" (p. 297 in the edition I had at the time). He wrote, "In real life nothing is solved; everything continues. We remain in our uncertainty, and we shall remain to the very end without knowing what to make of things. In the meantime life goes on and on, the same as ever. And one gets resigned to that too, as one does to everything else...as one does to everything." I -- like many young people -- had periods of moodiness, uncertainty, and dramatic pronouncements about the "meaning of life" or lack thereof. I had my existentialist phase. I copied out passages such as the above. Although my feelings were real, there was a certain luxury -- a luxury of youth and obliviousness -- in being able to dwell in such dramatic despair. When I got older, I realized that (unless one has a very hard life, or is clinically depressed, and I do acknowledge that those situations are very different from my relatively easy life, and therefore what I say here may not apply to people in those situations), one should -- I should -- recognize that life is far too precious to waste it on making dark statements about the sameness, dullness, heaviness, meaninglessness of life. Now that I am much older, and much more aware of mortality, those youthful moods and thoughts seem self-indulgent. But I try to be understanding of my younger self, as I was part of a long tradition -- one that included such authors as Gide, Sartre, Hesse, et al -- of such youthful wallowing in unearned despair.