And so hold on when there is nothing in you, Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

I came across this excerpt from Charles Bukowski in his Women: A Novel.

I was drawn to all the wrong things: I liked to drink, I was lazy, I didn't have a god, politics, ideas, ideals. I was settled into nothingness; a kind of non-being, and I accepted it. I didn't make for an interesting person. I didn't want to be interesting, it was too hard. What I really wanted was only a soft, hazy space to live in, and to be left alone. On the other hand, when I got drunk I screamed, went crazy, got all out of hand. One kind of behavior didn't fit the other. I didn't care.

I sometimes sense an ennui and laziness in the larger social milieu that this passage captures. I assume that it reflects a disengagement and loss of confidence arising from too much turmoil and change - technology change, economic transitions, social changes, etc. So much is happening, so quickly, that people seem to become unmoored and begin to drift in the comfortable fashion Bukowski describes.

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers

The cultivation of cultural relativism and all the other Gramscian nonsense doesn't help. Slowly and slowly we have to push back and regain that modicum of confidence and clarity that allows a person to act when acting is uncertain.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

(If by Rudyard Kipling)