Walking the tightrope between cynicism and sincerity
Life is either always a tightrope or a feather bed. Give me the tightrope. Edith Wharton I wrote recently about unscrupulous optimism. Mostly this seems to have been understood as a warning against the unbridled enthusiasm for the new and the recklessly blinkered belief that the best possible case will always come to pass. Naturally enough I suppose, some readers read into it a celebration of negativity and cynicism. This could not be further from the truth. My favourite definition of cynicism comes from the novelist John Fowles who wrote in The Magus, "All cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short, and [...]