A famous writer died and I thought back to the half-dozen times I’d seen him interviewed. He had a permanent sneer. He was always talking about how stupid someone else was. And he was probably right, but it was a fixed sneer, he couldn’t go far from it, no matter the topic. So in conversation that sneer was like a cattle chute, hemming him always toward the same rants. When I’d watch him I’d wonder what personal pain he must have suffered? I wonder if even he knew.
Witty bitterness is not more interesting than dull bitterness. Intelligence and a talent with words only makes your affect contagious, and that can sicken the rapt disciples, and I found myself wanting his sick heart sequestered, not broadcast to millions.
Lots of people suffer. What makes one heart bitter but the next, equally bruised, gentle and joyous? The bitter have not just suffered, but have also decided they shouldn’t have. Bitter has a bone to pick.
I think this writer was an atheist – I believe he said as much. So then, if you think the world has no meaning, whose bone do you pick? What justice emanates from the laws of physics? How do you hold, simultaneously, the thought that you have no meaning and the feeling that you have been mis-treated? How can you be a product of material laws and deserve anything other than what those same laws have given you? And how can the ones who hurt you be anything other than products of the same impersonal laws?
But these are not matters for logic or argument. No-one actually reasons, with discursive steps, into a fundamental stance toward the universe. And therefore few are reasoned out of it. It’s common for the heart to hold one stance while the mind holds an opposite one, like those who feel like the world has wronged them, but think the world is matter. Congealed energy. The extension of an explosion 14 billion years ago. Which has wronged me. Makes no sense, but each of these stances has its independent use.
It takes more than exogenous reason to cure the bifid soul. But the need for a cure is seldom felt, because there is always an applause for the divide; bitter enjoys bitter. The audience who is angry will applaud an angry voice. The echo chamber will feed the performer, who may not realize he did not need to be intelligent to get that applause. He just needed to sneer. It’s an easy dopamine hit.
This writer was a world-class intellect, a world-class verbal talent. I do wonder what he knew about himself. How does the materialist with a world-class I.Q. interpret his own bitterness, or his own joy? Did he find it at all interesting that a strong feeling, one maybe closer to himself than his art, came to him a 13 billion year old explosion? And what could be a more important use of such talent than to explain your own soul?
Or maybe what I’m calling “bitter”, or “sneer”, can be normal to the point the victim has become it, entirely. So these words have no meaning for him.