'An Art of Measured Speech'

Can a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure, I can. I dislike fashionable doom-saying at least as much as blinkered, kneejerk optimism. Not everyone out there is a mindless nihilist, a lazy critic of all that is best in our species. I’m reminded of the late Terry Teachout calling himself (and H.L. Mencken) an “ebullient pessimist.” We have attained too much wisdom and aesthetic accomplishment to let it rot or be torn down from within. It’s easier to criticize, say, Aristotle or Shakespeare, if you haven’t read them and incorporated the way they look at the world into your life. I’m thinking of writers like James Joyce, who could hardly make a move without evoking Aquinas or Flaubert, or George Santayana, who wrote with Democritus and Spinoza at his shoulder. At the conclusion of Missing Measures: Modern Poetry and the Revolt Against Meter (1990), his three-hundred-page historical and…