Of Being a Happy Misanthrope

Alceste, a man of near excessive virtue, finds himself falling in love with a woman who embodies all the things he despises in humanity. He even realizes that his love for her is patently absurd but is helpless in overcoming his desire for her. Trite critics have taken this as a sign of the impossible reconciliation of the heart and head; I refuse to believe that characters are billboards for a particular lay philosophical position.

Alceste finds himself beset by the very system of justice (unjustly, mind you) he unreasonably put so much faith in. I won't get into the details, but he decides to impose a kind of self-exile, if only to preserve what little sanity he has left. And the play ends. That's it.

I've also always been disturbed by how Strepsiades goes apeshit at the end of Aristophanes' Clouds, burning down the very Thinkery to which he had sent his son to learn how to get Strepsiades out of his debts. As a result, he estranges his son, in a fashion not unlike my estrangement from my own father exacted by a similarly unnecessary, overvalued collegiate education.

Christmas in Japan has the capacity to turn one into an incredibly cynical human being: they hype every commercial aspect of the holiday to the same excessive degrees Americans do, but the day itself is like any other. People go to work, and the material trappings of Christmas entirely disappear from the face of the country. Without the cathartic release from hyper-commercialism the actual holiday provides, one is easily left hollow and bitter.

I wonder--sometimes sitting in the bath, sometimes on a train staring at a teenager staring at me--whether Alceste ever found his little piece of nowhere to rule over justly, to uphold his high moral standards. I wonder if he's happy now--or was--if he's content musing to himself about how ethical he is. Does he ever come back for a brief visit to remind us all just how vile we are?