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the cheerless challenge of a Schopenhauer. His work forces them to struggle hard to make their vision seem anything more than anodyne consolation.

Only the selflessness of aesthetic contemplation, along with a kind of Buddhist self-abnegation, can purge us of the astigmatism of wanting, and allow us to see the world for what it is.

Only the obtusely self-deluded, confronted with the charnel house of history, could imagine otherwise.

Marxists, for instance, are usually atheists, but they believe that human life, or what they would prefer to call ‘history’, has a meaning in the sense of displaying a significant pattern.

What is amusing about Deep Thought’s ‘42’ is not just the bathos of it