O'Neill and the nothing new

As mentioned earlier, on Saturday I met an interesting pair of friends; one of these is an earnest young man named Felipe, obviously very bright, well-educated, and engagé. He asked me if I studied at the university. I said no, I preferred to read. He nodded: yes, he said, he liked to read too. And write. Oh, I replied: what do you write? Poetry? Or more scholarly work? Felipe was diffident. Well, he murmured, what I write, it's. . . well. . . I don't make such a distinction between the. . . you might call it, a sort of philosophical treatise. In verse. (I waited eagerly to hear more.) It's an old tradition, he was anxious to assure me. Lucretius, he added earnestly. I raised a metaphorical eyebrow: Lucretius? How about Parmenides? Thus I won. He mumbled something about Orphism, but he knew I'd won. This is how men work; it's a terrible habit really, and hopelessly superficial, but it gives us pleasure. I liked Felipe, maybe a lot.

How soon the tritest of triumphs gives way to the most oppressive trituration. Tonight, reading E. R. Curtius on mediaeval literature, I experience the terrifying unheimlich of the nothing new. I contemplate suicide. I wake up my wife from her sonorous slumber, but the feeling is impossible to convey. I realise my own total insignificance. Curtius is the Total Perspective Vortex of the academic world. I end up thinking, Perhaps I could be a decent teacher?

When I was on the Squarehead square rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way.

— Long Day's Journey Into Night (1941).

My confidence has been sufficiently shaken that when I flick over to PBS in the Seinfeld commercial-break, only to have Eugene O'Neill's embarrassing drivel rammed down my ears, for a moment I am swayed by the commentator's praise of its great beauty. Just for a moment, mind. It really is a steaming heap of shit.