Despair

Source: Road Trip with Raj/Unsplash

We sometimes say we despair, but what we actually mean is that we need or want something strongly and urgently. If the person who wants something strongly and urgently still has hope despite, perhaps, a few unsuccessful attempts at securing the desired good, that person may feel desperate but is not in despair.

At other times, we may really give up hope, but only about a particular matter or domain, not about life in general. For instance, a person may, after changing jobs several times, despair of his or her own prospects of finding a suitable occupation.

The one who experiences hopelessness about a particular matter may be said to despair, but this type of despair has a limited scope. The person afflicted by it has interests or activities that he or she can fall back on. Thus, in Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf describes a woman, Clarissa Dalloway, who becomes hopeless about relationships but finds solace in solitude:

Despairing of human relationships (people were so difficult), she often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her. [1]

There is something inspiring, from an observer's point of view, about the ability to find ways to cope. That’s perhaps especially true of an ability such as Clarissa's to make use of one's own inner resources and find peace in one's own company.

There are times, however, when despair becomes global: One despairs of one’s life or future as a whole. Whatever people or activities are left to fall back on to prevent a descent into darkness prove insufficient. One feels as though one has no lifeline left; that one’s life vest is just too small to keep one afloat.

Despair differs from resignation. While a person in both cases lacks hope, the one who merely resigns him or herself regards the current level of pain as bearable. If you resign yourself to your circumstances, you accept the hand you’ve been dealt, however grudgingly, and you go on. The person in despair, by contrast, has not simply lost hope but judges the pain of the current situation to be intolerable. There is no prospect for a better future, for sunnier days, but neither can one continue like this. It is precisely this subjective sense that the cross of life has become too heavy to bear, that one does not have enough of a fight left within, that we call despair.

There is something profoundly lonely about despair. A burden that we share with someone else is typically not seen as too heavy to bear. Of course, a tragedy may afflict two people simultaneously and destroy intimacy instead of bringing the two closer, as may happen when a couple loses a child. In that case, the two people may despair despite carrying the same burden for the lack of intimacy means that each carries it on his or her own. But if the burden is truly shared, people generally stop short of despair. They have each other.

In addition to loneliness, there is passivity about despair. Our passivity here is evidenced by the fact that despair comes unbidden and that, perhaps, it can only come unbidden. We cannot choose despair. (Though we can try to end it.)

Graham Greene underscores both the passivity and the loneliness aspect of despair in the novel Brighton Rock. A character in the novel named Rose marries a sociopathic young gangster, Pinkie. Pinkie is guilty of murder. Rose is a Roman Catholic and at one point, she attempts to give in to despair, said to be a mortal sin in her religion. It is as though Rose wants to commit a mortal sin to match Pinkie’s. But she finds she cannot choose to despair at will:

She felt terror, the idea of pain shook her, their purpose drove up in a flurry of rain against the old stained windscreen. This road led nowhere else. It was said to be the worst act of all, the act of despair, the sin without forgiveness; sitting there in the smell of petrol she tried to realize despair, the mortal sin, but she couldn’t; it didn’t feel like despair. He was going to damn himself, but she was going to show them that they couldn’t damn him without damning her too. There was nothing he could do, she wouldn’t do: she felt capable of sharing any murder. A light lit his face and left it; a frown, a thought, a child’s face. She felt responsibility move in her breasts; she wouldn’t let him go into that darkness alone. [2]

What exactly keeps Rose on this side of the brink? The answer, I think, is this: She perceives intuitively that sharing another’s darkness, even that of a murderer, is unlikely to lead to despair. For in sharing darkness, however terrible, we are not alone.

True despair leads not only to loneliness but to estrangement. It weakens the ties between the despairer and the rest of the world. What was previously seen as meaningful may come to appear meaningless. “What is the point?” the despairer asks. Strategies that can be used to counter ordinary sadness, such as facing outward and thinking about someone else instead of oneself, may not work here because one’s own intense mental anguish becomes the sole focus of one’s attention.

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Is there anything to be done about despair?

A person may sometimes make a sort of pact with death and suicide, telling him or herself, “I have a way out.” One can argue that the despairer who carries this thought as a secret weapon is not, after all, in complete despair. Perhaps, brighter days will never come, but the pain can be ended and ended at will. One can point out further that if the state is not one of complete despair, the suggested remedy is only good for a mild version of the disease. My response is that if death is the only or the best possible prospect, despair is, if not complete, very nearly so. The pact with death can, after all, be a possible remedy for despair but a terrible one. Or perhaps, a very desperate one.

What else, besides the grim thought of ending pain by committing suicide, can a despairer find in his or her arsenal?

The answer would depend on the particular case. Stories of people who overcame despair will probably help, particularly when the struggles one reads or hears about are similar to one's own.

A late bloomer, for instance, whose career has been in stasis for a while, may benefit from reading about William James’s struggles. James, considered the father of American psychology, tried to be an artist and a scientist. He got a medical degree but decided not to practice medicine. And he published his first book, Principles of Psychology, at the ripe age of 48, having taken 10 years to write it (life expectancy at birth for people born in 1842, the year James was born, was less than 40 years). Someone else may overcome the despair of widowhood by examining cases in which other people did. A person may, in other words, begin to prevail over his or her own hopelessness by acquiring evidence that life, after all, can get better.

It is also worth asking whether the things we are missing when in despair are truly things we cannot go without. The answer would sometimes be “no.” Indeed, some of what we lack would probably fail, if we had it, to make us happy or as happy as we think it would.

It is, however, not my purpose here to list all possible strategies for dealing with despair. There is one important point I wish to make before closing. Despair is compatible with being a good person, worthy of love. This should be obvious, but may be easily forgotten by someone in the grip of despair. Our perception of our own worth may get distorted under such circumstances.

Interestingly, in a different novel, The Heart of the Matter (which can be seen as a sort of study of despair — its genesis and its endgame), Graham Greene goes so far as to suggest that perhaps, only good people can despair:

Despair is … one is told, the unforgivable sin, but it is a sin the corrupt or evil man never practices. He always has hope. He never reaches the freezing-point of knowing absolute failure. Only the man of goodwill carries always in his heart this capacity for damnation. [3]

This is probably taking things too far. One can imagine an evil person who nonetheless loses all hope, but the more important point here is that Greene is right in this: Despair is not an unforgivable sin and neither is it, dropping religious vocabulary, a moral failing. To suggest otherwise is to add insult to injury.

The good news is that a complete state of despair may sometimes function as a sort of reset button. Realizing that we’ve come as low as we possibly can, we may try something completely new and, if we get lucky, bounce back. There is a certain kind of reassurance to the thought that while things are unlikely to get better, they cannot — for just that reason — get any worse either. The future for the person with nothing left to lose may then become pregnant with possibilities. Risks become worth taking.

If, on the other hand, pondering our own situation, we come to the realization that though we believed ourselves to have fallen to the bottom of the abyss, we actually do have a good deal to lose and that things can get much worse than they are, we may find a different way to end the descent into darkness, one based not on expectations of a future improvement but on a newly found recognition of how much better our situation actually is than it would be if it truly warranted despair.

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