Cynicism to me is really just a mask that is used to shield our soul from the realities of life. It's a self-defense mechanism. Modernism has in many ways led to this sort of perspective of life. We see the hollowness and feel the emptiness and pain deep inside. But it is also this very reaction that led Oscar Wilde to say that "life is too important to be taken seriously". This is the post-Modernist approach to transcending cynicism. We learn to laugh at life and the foibles of humanity.

I too had a close friend take his own life. The last time I saw him alive we embraced. The next, I was placing his ashes in an urn. His suicide affected me deeply, as much as the death of my father 12 years before. But one thing stands clear in my mind today: love and friendship can transcend what Conrad describes as, "The horror! The horror!". The hollowness that all those Modernist writers tried to articulate can actually be transcended, no matter how hopeless it may all seem. How? Because at the end of the day, the reality that we forge comes from within our souls, and we are the true authors of our own destinies...