Bombs Away

The nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once wrote that “the life of every individual, viewed as a whole and in general, and when only its most significant features are emphasized, is really a tragedy; but gone through in detail it has the character of a comedy.” He was neither the first nor the last person to note the stubborn intimacy between the tragic and the comic, but his insight suggests that these seeming opposites are just two ways of characterizing life’s vicissitudes. The years one might spend at a dead-end service job may be sad if taken as a whole, but the shifts one spends with co-workers tending to unreasonable customers might be pleasurable in their own way. One’s perspective is very rarely adopted voluntarily or through sheer force of will. Just as we live through the inevitable, so too are we fated, it seems, to see those experiences as alternately or maybe even simultaneously laughable and lamentable.

Viewed as a whole and in...