This is a blog inspired by another blog I read today. If we were great writers (one can dream), critics would call this intertextuality. Full disclosure: the blog was by someone who was a year ahead of me in high school. I didn’t know him well, but he seemed smart and friendly and has published a new book called Everyday Resilience for Everyday Heroes. You can find it for pre-order on the web.
His blog today took issue with a contrarian opinion piece in The New York Times published earlier this month: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/19/health/resilience-overrated.html
In the NYT, the author argues, subversively to me, that resilience as a virtue can be manipulated by capitalist or authoritarian powers who want the proletariat to endure back-breaking work for the sake of elite classes. An excerpt from the piece: “What is resilience anyway but an unfair exchange of energy? But who has time to consider these matters when they’re working to exhaustion?”
I don’t agree with the approach the NYT columnist takes to the notion of resilience, and she acknowledges confusion about what the word means. She seems to ascribe to it some nefarious intention on the part of the “system.” For me, it has to do with accepting, adapting to, and hopefully overcoming an environment that is beyond your–or really anyone’s–control. To me, this is a problem with contemporary liberal politics: it seems to attribute to authorities more power, for good and for ill, than they really have.
In literature, I think Albert Camus’ essay “The Myth of Sisyphus” is a good reflection on resilience in the face of a universal, inexplicable situation, rather than one necessarily imposed or even really influenced by human authorities. As punishment by the gods for trying to defeat death, Sisyphus of ancient Greek mythology is condemned in his own afterlife to continually rolling a large stone up a mountain, a stone that only plummets back to the bottom of the incline each time he scales it. Camus ends his essay with the exhortation, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
Another disclosure: Camus’ essay is considered an important source for Absurdist literature, which makes up a substantial part of the book this site is promoting. Some Absurdist writers have been accused of “reductive pessimism in a world that demands political action”(sorry, don’t remember the source of this quote). And I think there may be a tension here between those seeking agitprop from art and those looking for something else.