Pessimism is a very easy way out because it is a short view of life. If you look at what is happening around us today, you can’t help but feel that life is a terrible complexity of problems. But if you look back a few thousand years, you realize that we have advanced fantastically. If you take a long view, I do not see how you can be pessimistic about the future of mankind.
I become very amused by my colleagues – particularly in the study of literature – the tragic view is the only key to life. This is self-indulgent nonsense. They simply feel rotten about everything, and that is terribly easy. But if you try to see things a little more evenly, it is surprising what complexities of comedy and ambiguity and irony appear. And that, I think, is what is vital to a novelist. Just writing tragic novels is easy. – Robertson Davies
I become very amused by my colleagues – particularly in the study of literature – the tragic view is the only key to life. This is self-indulgent nonsense. They simply feel rotten about everything, and that is terribly easy. But if you try to see things a little more evenly, it is surprising what complexities of comedy and ambiguity and irony appear. And that, I think, is what is vital to a novelist. Just writing tragic novels is easy. – Robertson Davies
Quoted by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Creativity (Harper Collins)
Courtesy: Reader’s Digest, September 1997 (Points to Ponder)
Courtesy: Reader’s Digest, September 1997 (Points to Ponder)
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