'Oh, he's dead, you know.'
'Is he?'
A right raison d'être, that is.
Poignantly, a couple of years after that final TV show, Tony Hancock himself committed suicide. The despair that he was articulating was evidently too close to the truth for comfort. Hope springs eternal? No, Mr Pope, I'm afraid it doesn't always. Sometimes hope dries up. When it does, it isn't just hope that's extinguished. A person, bereft of purpose, dies too. 'I have nothing to live for,' says the suicide note. Dante, in his The Divine Comedy, makes the inscription over the gate of hell read, 'All hope abandon, you who enter here!' There is nothing, absolutely nothing, quite so appalling and dreadful to the human spirit as to be irremediably hopeless.
What are you looking forward to? What is the point of your life? A lot of us manage to put on a façade of ambition and direction in life. We tell people we're happy and well adjusted, and that we know where we are going. But is it not the truth that the Monday-morning feeling gets us too? And if we really plumb those inner depths of personal honesty, the reason it gets us is that there is a vacuum inside us. We do not know where we are going. We do not have anything important or big enough to live for, nothing bigger than the next party, the next disco, or the next date.
In the 1960s and 1970s, quite a lot of young people dropped out of careers and study, part in protest, and part in despair at this sense of hopelessness. The rat-race, they said, was an exercise in futility. The 1980s witnessed a revived commitment to competing in the rat-race. But the fundamental question those earlier drop-outs asked was never really answered. What is the point of slogging your guts out for forty-two and a half hours a week, forty-nine weeks a year? Whether the job is demanding or boring, whether the atmosphere is friendly or hostile, whether the
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