We Taste Nothing Pure

Nature, it seems, has determined that nothing shall reach us whole. Every joy arrives in the company of something that diminishes it, and every sorrow comes with some relief tucked behind it. The Epicureans sought pure pleasure and the Stoics sought pure virtue, and neither school produced men you would honestly envy. The pursuit of purity in any experience seems to produce not the thing itself but a very refined awareness of its impossibility.

I find this to be true in everything I examine closely. There is in the greatest pleasures an element of anxiety — the pleasure is so good we fear its ending before it has ended, and by fearing it we half-end it ourselves. In the deepest griefs there is often a strange aliveness, a keenness of sensation that we do not wish to admit we are almost grateful for. A man at the bedside of his dying father is not only in pain; he is also very much awake, more present than he has been in months. He would not choose this, but he is in it completely. Our emotions are not pure specimens; they are alloys.

Even in the most perfect happiness the thinking man finds something that dissatisfies him; even in the sharpest misery he finds something that sustains him. Nature does not permit extremes.

What follows from this, I think, is not despair but a kind of relaxed honesty. There is no condition of unmixed good to strive for, and therefore no shame in the mixture we find ourselves in. The man who insists on perfect joy ends by refusing all joy, because no joy is perfect. The man who refuses to admit any comfort in suffering condemns himself to suffer without intelligence. Better to receive what comes as it actually comes — complex, contradictory, and real — and to work with the materials as given rather than the materials as dreamed.