Dear Fellow Traveler,
How do you make sense of the world? What does it mean to “live well” in a world rife with conflict and suffering? These types of perennial questions seem to be the most difficult to answer.
Interestingly, the transcendentalists (figures like Emerson and Thoreau) offered sage advice for living in a chaotic world. My conversation with Mark Matousek (author of Lessons from an American Stoic) discussed the notion of “cosmic optimism” amidst the brutal facts of reality.
Matousek explained,
Optimism is another legacy of Transcendentalism, but this wasn’t a hopefulness based on denying the evil of which people are capable. Instead, Waldo’s ‘cosmic optimism’ faces the brutal facts of human fallibility without losing sight of their redemptive potential.
