The Church of TED is very optimistic. Bulgarians are some of the most pessimistic in the world. There are the Happy, the Unhappy and the Bulgarians.
I refuse to give into the sad reflex of French envy because this envy paralyzes our country.
Sometime between when the Summer of Love ended and the Summer of Sam began, America became a nation of cynics about love.
In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.
One has to be foolish or irredeemably stupid to believe that anything good can come to Europe from the land of presumed opportunity.
I'm not good at finding 'encouraging' features in American culture. I doubt that aesthetic literacy has much of a future here.
France has neither winter, nor summer, nor morals. France is miserable because it is filled with Frenchmen, and Frenchmen are miserable because they live in France.
It is a quite remarkable fact that the great religions of the most civilized peoples are more deeply fraught with sadness than the simpler beliefs of earlier societies. This certainly does not mean that the current of pessimism is eventually to submerge the other, but it proves that it does not lose ground and that it does not seem destined to disappear.
Suspicion of happiness is in our blood.
