The Fate—Say! Of The Flowers

 There's a classic magazine profile of the legendary Simpsons writer George Meyer that includes an anecdote from his childhood. A sister of Meyer's reported that once, as a young boy, he burst into tears during a trip to the mall at the sight of a store that specialized in selling only goods for left-handed people. Meyer was reportedly moved to tears because he worried that not enough people would shop at a store like that to keep it in business. His sister used it as an illustration of his unusual capacity for empathy. 

I felt a great shock of recognition when I read this story, all the way back in high school—and not just because the "leftorium" found its way into the Simpsons show, by way of Meyer's recollection (Ned Flanders at one point quits his job, in an early season, in order to start his own company selling only left-handed goods). I also recognized the story because it happened to me. I was moved to deep sadness as a child on multiple occasions by the sight of businesses that I thought could not attract customers. 

The feeling has never left me. I happened to be watching a documentary about Australia's cane toad infestation this week with my parents, and we came to a segment in which the filmmaker interviews a man who tried to make a go of it selling tickets to a traveling cane toad-based roadshow—with limited success. The episode is played for grim laughs, but it fills me with an unspeakable sadness and pity. And I hate this pity too, even as I feel it, because it seems an added offense against the dignity of the pitied. 

With age, this sadness ripened into a natural hatred of capitalism—one that has never left me. The idea that we ought to be excited about "competition," and to regard this great Darwinian winnowing of the economy's business ventures as a salutary and wholesome development, has always struck me as the part of the American national character that is hardest to relate to. Personally, I hate competition. I wish we didn't have it. And for a long time, in my youth, I therefore assumed that socialism was the answer. 

Yet, after a certain point I realized that socialism too, however advisable on other grounds, could not solve the root problem. Socialism does not so much eliminate competition as channel it into new forms. There are still prizes to be won and lost, even in a command economy. People still have ideas that fizzle; hopes that perish on the vine; aspirations that amount to nothing—even in the ideal Scandinavian social democracy. There are things no government scheme can fix—one of them being disappointment. 

And so I came to realize, after a certain point in my life, that there is simply a fixed and irremediable sadness in the world. Maybe it can be lessened—but it certainly cannot be removed. A socialist utopia cannot eliminate the possibility of failure. It cannot do anything to resolve the problem of death (despite the efforts of certain schemers to delude themselves otherwise). And even if it did—somehow—even if it cured aging and lifelessness, it could not alter the universe's great law of change, which is a kind of death. 

This last is not my insight but Walter Pater's—as described in his great novel of ideas, Marius the Epicurean. His protagonist, during his long pursuit of a system of life that will remedy all ills and provide insulation from the disappointments of experience, continually runs up against the reality that there are some things no philosophy can solve. There is a hard kernel of sadness at the basis of life that cannot be extricated. Part of the reason for it is death, he observes—but part of it also is mere mutability. 

Even if the golden age sung by the poets could be restored, Marius reflects, "Death, and the little perpetual daily dyings, which have something of its sting, [it] must necessarily leave untouched. And, methinks, that were all the rest of man’s life framed entirely to his liking, he would straightway begin to sadden himself, over the fate—say, of the flowers! For there is, there has come to be since Numa lived perhaps, a capacity for sorrow in his heart, which grows with all the growth, alike of the individual and of the race[.]"

Indeed. If human beings did not die, other innocent creatures would. If all animate matter could somehow find a way to cure the problem of aging, dissolution, and decay, the flowers nevertheless would still wither and drop their petals. No philosophy can cure this deeper problem. And even if it could—even if all beings could be spared from change—what, though, of all the beings from eons past who were not eligible for the treatment? The cure came too late for them. The root sadness of the world would endure. 

William James once observed as much as well, in contemplating the skeletons in the Harvard museum of natural history. Observing their great fangs and crushing jaws, he thought of all the innocent wriggling lifeforms through the ages who must have gone in panic-terror down into the black maw. It leads James to conclude that some facts of experience are simply irreconcilable to any notion of a good and ordered universe: "it may be that there are forms of evil so extreme as to enter into no good system whatsoever." 

This is the root of what made Meyer cry. This is the "cosmic sadness" of which V.S. Naipaul wrote—the "wórld-sorrow" of G.M. Hopkins. It is the fact that there are such "radical evils"—as James called them—such root sadnesses as the fact that all things change and decay—that cannot be remedied by any conceivable philosophical system or ideal order of government. Orwell once observed that even utopia would still have toothache. It would also—adds Pater—still have dead, dried, and wilting flowers. 

In a strange way, too, there is comfort in that. I felt my heart lift, somehow, at Pater's line—when he points out that, if all else fails us, there will still be "the fate—say! of the flowers" to sorrow over. It means we will not lose our humanity. It means that no utopian scheme can make us into machines that no longer weep and pity. It means that there will be no optimum attained that will silence the voice of indignation that cries out against the heavens for creating such a world of abounding sorrow in the first place. 

As painful as the pity is, then—it also reassures me that there is something human still inside me. There is a voice of protest in me that the universe cannot conquer. The moment, by contrast, that I start to accept—the moment when, in saintly fashion, I manage to "will even this" (in Aldous Huxley's phrase—see the Devils of Loudun) or to accept that "what is, is good," is the moment I cease to be a human being and become something much worse—an angel, perhaps. 

And so, let me hold on always to my pity. Let me never start preaching, God help me, "the virtues of competition." 

Let me say, with Edna St. Vincent Millay, that "I do not approve. And I am not resigned." Let me retain the part of me that cries at the sight of special-interest stores. It's the first flowering in the child of Camus's "metaphysical rebel," who refuses to accept the universe. And out of this first disobedience, this great original sin against things as they are—all other forms of social rebellion and betterment—everything that has ever "rendered less/the sum of human wretchedness" (in Byron's phrase)—has come.