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On Respair, Regret, Reality, and Relapse
Four reflections
Today’s reflections on struggling to find hope, wishing we could change the past, not accepting what’s real, and going ’round the track again.
Respair and Utspair
Respair, as Susie Dent wants us to know, is an old word meaning to recover from despair.
Recovery isn’t only a choice to feel better. Repair of the injury is also involved. Repair is the action, and respair is the feeling. Toni Morrison wrote in Song of Solomon: “Perhaps that’s what all human relationships boil down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it?” Maintaining the conditions of mutual existence is the baseline, and once we have a relationship (or don’t have it), we can have feelings about it.
Recovery is also the choice to save our own lives. “It turns out that you can get shot in the stomach and live, if you do it just right,” writes Charles Yu in How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, “and it turns out that I’m okay, it just happens to be the most excruciating pain I have ever felt in my entire life, and it feels really good.”
I once heard someone try to coin “utspair,” utter despair. This despair, I suppose — if the “ut” be true — is that which can’t be recovered from. With utspair, there is no despair-to-respair…
