“Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”
George Carlin
“…a sanguine temper, though forever expecting more good than occurs, does not always pay for its hopes by any proportionate depression. It soon flies over the present failure, and begins to hope again.”
from Emma, by Jane Austen, 1815
* sanguine: optimistic, cheerful
For the better part of ten years I have lived by the philosophy of never getting my hopes up for anything, on the premise that I would never suffer a great disappointment. This notion served me well—or so I thought, until one recent morning, when I was reading Jane Austen’s novel Emma. (Which, I have to admit, I probably would not have picked up if it weren’t for the fact that Jane Austen is one of my wonderful wife Sara’s favorite authors, and that reading each other’s favorite books—even though it means reading outside of our usual genres—is part of our love language.)
When I came across the above passage, which stopped me in my tracks, I flung the book down, smacked myself in the forehead, and cried: “AHA! What a fool I’ve been, for all these years! How could I have been so blind, for so long?”
You see, while it may be true that no instances of heavy suffering from great disappointments come readily to mind, it is absolutely true that I have been told, on more than a few occasions, by dear friends, family, and even at times by those happy acquaintances that influence our lives no less for whatever circumstances of distance or disposition that may prevent the deepening of ties—that I was turning into a short-tempered cynic.
And upon further reflection, it is also true that I have at times been able to feel almost literally the idealism of my youth slipping away, draining out of me. You see, I never used to read the news. Throughout my high school years and most of my time at university, I could be found stating quite proudly that I wasn’t interested in politics, and that I couldn’t care less about current events. My rationale was that I had no power over anything that happened in the world at large, so I might as well ignore all of it and just continue living out my hedonistic existence. And before any of you point out that it sounds like I was already a cynic—especially considering that my own conduct was “motivated wholly by self-interest,” let me explain the difference: it would have been impossible for me to be cynical with regard to the world or humanity at large back then, precisely because I lacked any sort of real-world knowledge or experience that could have led me to feel jaded.
UPDATE: Three months later— My positive outlook has stuck with me ever since reading that passage in Jane Austen’s Emma, and there’s no turning back! Woohoo!
-Jon
