Got a copy of Ambrose Bierce’s “The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary,” initially published in 1881, recently. Bierce has always appealed to me because I like his horror short stories including “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and “The Damned Thing”; he was called the 19th-century Stephen King by one critic.
The introduction to this edition says the “dictionary” is quintessential Bierce in that the author can be summarized by one of his entries for this book: “Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they should be.” Nineteenth-century realists had a good point: The Romantics, Aesthetics, and Decadents had gone too far. But I still prefer Oscar Wilde’s observation that, “a cynic is someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”
There was a pop song I liked in my youth called “Tales from the Riverbank” by The Jam. Here is one stanza:
Now life is so critical
Life is too cynical
We lose our innocence
We lose our very soul