The character of which is optimism, that finding-joy in the state of things which is necessary for continuing to live alongside them. Optimism untempered leads to little poetry, though, as sweetness unbalanced by substance turns sour, and the above quote despite its delight reads more like Malcolm Gladwell than we might like. But let's dig a little deeper; Beckett was mentioned and he risks avoiding sweetness entirely.
If one of the thieves was saved, saving implies salvation, which gets us partway there. Most people know that Jesus Christ is said to have been crucified; many know that he did not die alone, but rather on his left and on his right were also crucified two thieves. According to one of the gospels, one of the thieves asked Christ for redemption, while the other cursed him. To this, St. Augustine is quoted with a pronouncement for our lives:
Do not presume—one of the thieves was damned.”
Here we have the possibility — do not despair, there is hope to be had— tempered by the recognition of the material — do not presume that your hope is the same as reality. There's a simultaneity in the structure and in the thing that remains true and unsaid: both of the thieves, regardless of their afterlife exculpation or predestination, still died, painfully, at the hands of the state. Beckett says, of Augustine: "That sentence has a wonderful shape. It is the shape that matters."
So what are we left with, today? Not to despair! Perhaps dum vivimus, vivamus. Not to presume—if judgment does await us, our odds are not good. If judgment does not await us, an end does. Let that end be as far away as it can! To remember the joy, and temper it with our knowledge of the true things that stay unsaid. And perhaps most of all, while we are here, to find the variety of human experience—and its shape, the balance between the joy and the real—wonderful.
