This chapter examines trimming as a face of moderation. It starts from the definition of trimming given by the Marquess of Halifax in a famous essay, “The Character of a Trimmer” (1684), and compares trimmers to tightrope walkers. It argues that trimmers tend to support the parties they dislike least and search for a “wise mean between barbarous extremes.”

This chaptercomments on the relationship between moderation and civility and argues that the latter can work as an effective antidote to a festering climate of fear, rage, and intimidation.

Without a Messiah expected, and if one’s current pain or trial is meaningless, why not commit suicide? In the Modernist canon, suicide is typically putting an end to one’s misery because there’s no reason not to do so, or because one is in any event a machine caused to do so by necessary causes and effects. Albert Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus is an essay on how to live without hope or suicide; his novel The Plague starts with an averted suicide and ends with limited hope – or a hope for limits. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot begins and ends with the central duo’s wish, both times deferred, to hang themselves. Modernist responses to the question of meaning, and the attendant problem of suicide, include: persisting in hope or waiting despite the minimal probability of hope’s fulfillment (Franz Kafka, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ralph Ellison, Beckett); the epiphanies of the everyday, getting what it seemed you hoped for even without exactly having hoped for it (Virginia Woolf); affirmation of the repetitions, recurrences, and accidents of natural and human life, overcoming their sameness through an act of will (Camus).

Chapter 5 asks two questions: Does finding a meaning for life prevent people from killing themselves? Do any of the four ways of acquiring meaning described in Chapter 4 prevent people from killing themselves? The first question has rarely been asked by philosophers. Albert Camus, in his The Myth of Sisyphus, was an exception, but his thoughts are limited only to the first way of acquiring meaning - achieving goals. The suicidal persons whose stories I tell in the chapter regarded only the last way of acquiring meaning - loving and being loved - to be what helped them deal with their suicidal impulses. They did so because the first three ways of acquiring meaning were largely irrelevant to their emotional pain. Chapter 5 also asks whether believing in God prevents people from killing themselves. The answer is that it can and sometimes does.

Chapter 2 distinguishes everyday boredom from existential boredom. The former involves losing particular desires whereas the latter involves losing all desires - nothing interests one. The chapter describes the fright and terror that are often felt when existential boredom threatens. It also describes evasive tactics that are used to avoid that terror. Among these tactics are physical activities, mental activities, and moral and religious activities. Without these evasive tactics, one could experience dread, agony, despair, frustration, rebellion, or suicidal feelings. The myth of Sisyphus is used to illustrate rebellion. One can, however, deal with boredom in a different way by regarding it as what Soren Kierkegaard calls a “call from eternity.” The chapter describes five conditions that are needed for one to experience such a “call,” plus the differences between an activity that is used simply to evade boredom and one that alleviates boredom without doing so evasively.