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“Wise and cynical”

Plath used that phrase as if it was a given, as if those two words naturally belonged together. Wisdom and cynicism. Brother and sister, they are. Two peas in a pos. Inseparable as a teenage boy from the girl he loves.

Perhaps they are. “Ignorance is bliss,” right? “With much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief,” wrote The Teacher.

After all, how can one, having risen above the foolishness of conventional thinking, look then at the intellectual and spiritual abyss that is humanity and see anything in which to find joy?

It used to be that I could see the budge of new life in a woman and could find nothing but joy. “Oh, the potential!” I would think. These days, however, I find nothing but sorrow. “There’s another one for the wolves,” I say. “Another ear to be tagged by the farmer. Another piece of meat to be herded to the slaughterhouse. Stripped of its life, stripped of its guts, stripped of its bones, it will be just another soulless slab of steak to be consumed by the ever-hungering King of Earth. Self-service and his queen, Greed, demand a never-ending flow of flesh. And they’ll get it.”

Yes, “every day I go to school and study humans,” and the more I learn, the more I mourn for them. Standing in the oasis, I couldn’t see the desert for the trees. But from the mountain top, I survey that very same landscape and see nothing but a barren wasteland devoid of any life. Sand here and sand there. Incalculable numbers who’s sole purpose is to be blown about by the wind. Today they form a dune here and a hill there simply because the wind so wills it. But tomorrow there will be a different wind and all the work of the former will be lost and no one will know the difference.

The wise, then, will still watch from the mountaintop with tear filled eyes as the whole world goes to Sheol in a hand basket. Powerless to change the unwilling and unknowing masses, they will exclaim forever,

“VANITY! VANITY! ALL IS VANITY!”

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