Keep Your Mind in Hell

In a recent TLS, I wrote about the spoils of pessimism—whether we should be quietists, retreating from the world, or activists who fight for it—but my real subject was despair.

I did not get to write about the best book on despair I’ve read: Christian Wiman’s prose-poetic Zero at the Bone. Wiman teaches in the Divinity School and the Institute of Sacred Music at Yale. So it is no surprise that his “Entries Against Despair” dwell on religion—as well as cancer, madness, and addiction.

What was surprising to me is how close I felt to Wiman’s outlook even as an atheist. One of my core beliefs is that the desire for God is more disorienting, and faith in its fulfillment more momentous, than they seem to be for many professed believers. “One doesn’t follow God in hope of happiness,” Wiman writes, “but because one senses—miserable, flimsy little word for that beak in one’s bowels—a truth that renders ordinary contentment irrelevant.”

There are some hungers that only an endless commitment to emp…