On Consolation: Notes on Our Search for Meaning and the Antidote to Resignation

The thing about life is that it happens, that we can never unhappen it. Even forgiveness, for all its elemental power, can never bend the arrow of time, can only ever salve the hole it makes in the heart. Despair, which visits upon everyone fully alive, is simply the reflexive tremor of resignation in the face of life’s irremediable happening. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” Albert Camus wrote — a simple equation, the mathematics of which we spend our lives learning. Consolat...