No, to despair is not merely to feel very, very sad.
Despair is rooted in loss.
What is lost in despair is a feeling that has been lost to contemporary language, but is often translated as hope. The actual Latin word was sperare, which also birthed the concepts of speed and prosperity.
It isn’t that despair is merely the loss of the ability to move. It certainly can’t be reduced to the lack of money. Despair is the loss of the feeling of vitality that provides energy to all of our efforts. It is the feeling that there is no longer any reason to believe that anything worthwhile will come from striving.
Viktor Frankl believed that despair can be defined as the experience of suffering from which meaning has been taken away.
Ironically, some say that out of despair can come a grim resolve. Some who despair feel that because they have lost everything that really matters, they have nothing left to lose. Labor activist Cesar Chavez explained, “We draw our strength from the very despair in which we have been forced to live.
Gustave Flaubert asserted that, “The most glorious moments of life are not the days of supposed success, but instead those days when, out of dejection and despair, you feel arise in you a challenge to life.”
Elie Wiesel, who, like Frankl, was a survivor of the Holocaust under the Nazis, wrote, “Because I remember, I despair. Because I remember, I have the duty to reject despair.”
