‘Optimism’: On Looking on the Bright Side
A review of ‘Optimism’, by Helen Keller; 1903.
Helen Keller was born in 1880. She lost her sight and hearing after a bout of illness at 19 months old and used ‘home signs’, a system of gestures often invented naturally by deaf children, until, at the age of seven, she met her lifelong teacher Anne Sullivan. Keller went on to receive an education, attending Radcliffe College of Harvard University and becoming the first deafblind person in the United States to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. In the course of her life she wrote 14 books and hundreds of speeches and essays on a wide range of subjects. She campaigned for disabilities, women’s suffrage, labour rights and world peace. She became a socialist and a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union. She led, to put all of this more simply, an extraordinary life.
Given Keller’s unhappy start in life, she could have been forgiven for falling into despair. But she chose the path of optimism instead. Her essay on the topic, a favourite of gurus, InstaTherapists and wellness charlatans everywhere, is a powerful piece of writing which is worth reading precisely because its author had every reason not to be an optimist. Like James Allen, whose As a Man Thinketh was an early addition to the burgeoning genre of self-help, she lived out her philosophy, and though we cannot say her optimism accounted for all of her her success in life (or, even, any of it), we are minded to believe that it did. The messenger — be it Allen, born into poverty, or Keller, who was deafblind, or Epictetus, the great Stoic slave — matters. After all, as Keller writes, ‘The test of all beliefs is their practical effect in life.’
Given Keller’s unhappy start in life, she could have been forgiven for falling into despair.
Optimism is short and divided into three parts. In the first, Keller describes ‘optimism within’. It is more than a sunny outlook, she tells us: it is a conscious choice to engage with life on the most hopeful terms possible. Indeed, it is the only approach that makes life bearable, Keller argues, as it keeps the spirit light even when the body is weighed down with pain. Keller says that her own troubles have not dimmed her view of existence but rather cast a bright light on its worth. (It is, as Thomas Paine writes in his Crisis, ‘dearness only which gives everything its value’.) In the second part, Keller opens out her argument and applies it to humanity as a whole, insisting that all human progress has sprung from optimism, and that pessimism leads not just to misery but stagnation. ‘Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement,’ she writes. ‘Nothing can be done without hope.’ In the third and final part of the essay, she reflects on the role of faith in sustaining optimism. She does not tie this to any particular religious doctrine but rather to an intuition that life is good and the world has a purpose.
As I have alluded to already, this idea, which might uncharitably be called ‘positive thinking’, has been trampled on by every motivational speakers for as long as there have been any; but it is close to impossible to charge Keller with naïveté when is living proof that optimism can be the engine that allows us, irrespective of our hardships, to triumph, in the end, over adversity. Nor do we get the impression that Keller is, as it were, putting a brave face on things. She really is an optimist. And in tones that are at once warm and firm, she asks us, the reader, to accept what she believes to be the secret to the good life: choose to look at it the right way. It is telling, I think, that one of the five most-common regrets of the dying, as described the palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware in her best-selling book, is ‘I never allowed myself to be happy’. Allowed. That is to say: we have a choice.
She asks us to accept what she believes to be the secret to the good life: choose to look at it the right way.
Keller evidently had the empathy to anticipate that some of her readers would view her essay as a protracted exercise in denial. She tackles this head-on, acknowledging with neither self-pity nor understatement the weight of her struggles. But she does not let them define her. And the clarity and sense of purpose with which she writes act like a window onto her soul. Every word is a declaration: an expression of her will not to survive but to thrive, and not in spite of her limitations but because of them. Her style throughout the essay shines with the simplicity and elegance of one who says what she means and sees no need to labour the point She does not digress from her path. She does not get bogged down in abstraction. She wants to persuade, not to dazzle. And so the structure of the essay is logical: we are guided at a clip along the path of her argument; and it is just as well just the pace is brisk, for even Helen Keller would risk moralising if she dwelled for too long on such a topic.
Here, reader, is a roadmap for resilience and excellence. Don’t let the bastards get you down. But don’t get yourself down either. There is something good to take from every situation we encounter. What first glance appear to be problems, writes Pablo d’Ors in his Biography of Silence, ‘begin to look like opportunities … Life’s great hurdles are what most make us grow. We should be grateful to have so many conflicts!’ Keller says that we can choose the path of bitterness and self-pity, constantly lamenting the perceived injustices we bear, finding fault in others, ourselves and our experiences. Or we can do the opposite.
