Therapy

either hoping or remembering. Either he thinks things were better in the past or he hopes they’ll be better in the future, but they’re always bad now. That’s ordinary common-or-garden unhappiness. But the unhappy man “in a stricter sense” isn’t even present to himself in his remembering or his hoping. Kierkegaard gives the example of a man who looks back wistfully to the joys of childhood which in fact he never himself experienced (perhaps he was thinking of his own case). Likewise the “unhappy hoper” is never present to himself in his hoping, for reasons which were obscure to me until I came to this passage: “Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment.”
    I know exactly what he means by “gratifying disappointment”. I worry about making decisions because I’m trying to guard against things turning out badly. I hope they’ll turn out well, but if they do turn out well I hardly notice it because I’ve made myself miserable imagining how they could turn out badly; and if they turn out badly in some unforeseen way (like clause fourteen in the Heartland contract) that only confirms my underlying belief that the worst misfortunes are unexpected. If you’re an unhappy hoper you don’t really believe things will get better in the future (because if you did you wouldn’t be unhappy). Which means that when they don’t get better it proves you were right all along. That’s why your disappointment is gratifying. Neat, eh?
    I also have a persistent feeling that things were better in the past — that I must have been happy once, otherwise I wouldn’t know I was unhappy now, and somewhere along the way I lost it, I blew it, I let it go, though I can only recall that “it” in fleeting fragments, like watching the 1966 World Cup Final. It’s possible, however, that I’m kidding myself, that really I was always miserable because I was always an unhappy hoper. Which paradoxically would make me an unhappy rememberer too.
    How can you be both? Easy-peasy! That’s precisely the definition of the unhappiest man:
     
This is what it amounts to: on the one hand, he constantly hopes for something he should be remembering... On the other hand he constantly remembers something he should be hoping for... Consequently what he hopes for lies behind him and what he remembers lies before him... He is forever quite close to the goal and at the same moment at a distance from it; he now discovers that what it is that makes him unhappy, because now he has it, or because he is this way, is precisely what a few years ago would have made him happy if he had had it then, whereas then he was unhappy because he did not have it.
     
    Oh yes, this guy has my number alright. The unhappiest man. Why then am I grinning all over my face as I read?
     
    * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
     
    Sunday afternoon, 28th Feb. I didn’t go to the studio today. I thought I would show Heartland that I resent the way they’re treating me. Sally approved. I left a message on the office answerphone early this morning to say I wouldn’t be coming in. I didn’t give a reason, but Ollie and Hal will figure it out. It’s the first time I’ve missed a recording since last April, when I had a stomach bug. Needless to say, I’m punishing myself more than I’m punishing them. Hal will be too busy to brood on my absence, and Ollie is not the brooding type. Whereas I have nothing to do except brood. The day has passed with excruciating slowness. I keep looking at the clock and working out what stage of rehearsal they will have reached. It’s five past four now, and dark already. It’s bitterly cold outside, with a thin coating of snow. Blizzards expected in other parts of the country, the papers say.
    The posh Sundays are full of handwringing and breastbeating. The country seems to be going through some huge crisis of confidence, Internal Derangement of the National Psyche. The Gallup poll published last week showed eighty per cent of the electorate were dissatisfied with the Government’s performance. According to another poll, more than forty per cent of young people think that Britain will become a worse country to live in over the next decade. Which means, presumably, they think that either Labour won’t win the next election, or it won’t make any difference if they do. We’ve become a nation of unhappy hopers.
    And unhappy