Commentary
As a working principle, the conviction that things are always worse than they seem is hard to beat.
Along with the observation from William Dean Howells that the problem for a critic isn’t making enemies but keeping them, that mournful conviction that things are worse than they seem has the twin clarifying advantage of being psychologically helpful and empirically true.
Both have stood me in good stead.
That is to say, if Johnny Mercer was right that one should “accentuate the positive,” one should also avoid the attitude of Dr. Pangloss who, Leibnizian that he was, taught that this is “the best of all possible worlds.”…