RS: I wouldn't call it boredom. I mean in the sense of ennui, which only appeared in the 19th century.

RT: They had acedia in medieval times.

RS: Yes, but that wasn't regarded as a creative thing. Rather it was an invitation to resist it, to achieve self-containment, like a monk in his cell: somebody self-sufficient and able to fill his life with meaning out of his posture of submission towards the divine will.

DJ: Ray, can I just press you a little on this? You're something of an apostle of progress and that word "hope" came in at one point and I think we can all agree that hope is a good thing, whether or not optimism is a good thing. But in this brave new world, what will be the content of this transcendence that you talk about? In a rather poetic passage in your book, you speak of "the beyond beyond which there is no beyondering", but will there be any content in this? 

RT: There are two parts to your question. The first is about having a sense of direction and purpose in one's life. The feeling that you are going to make a difference, however arrogant, is a potent expression. Without that desire, life can seem meaningless.

But there is a different kind of answer connected with finding something to fill the vacuum left by the departure of religion. Well, for me, it is an increasingly intense awareness of the complex miracle of our ordinary, everyday conscious life. The more you pick it apart, the more you unpack it, the more extraordinary it seems. It can awaken an utter gratitude for the fact that one is without that necessarily leading to one feeling grateful to any particular Being at all.

RS: You're looking for an intransitive gratitude.

RT: Absolutely, that's beautiful. This prompts me to refer to Roger's tragic pessimism, expressed in Death-Devoted Heart (OUP, 2004), his wonderful book on Wagner.

DJ: I also was interested in something that you touched on briefly, the subject of sexuality and eroticism. Because that lies at the heart of a lot of pessimism, and when you look back Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner, it all seems to do with sex. I wonder whether there is some connection there, and whether we can link up these disparate things?

RT: There's a biographical link through sex between those awful characters. Nietzsche's relationships with women were catastrophic. The one true love of Wagner's life lay tantalisingly just beyond reach. Schopenhauer's relationships with women were sensual, but dispassionate and often cruel. So it's not hard to imagine that the profound sense that they had of the centrality of sexuality combined with their profound sexual disappointments would feed into pessimism.

DJ: We have a culture now in which sex plays a central role, and yet it's strangely bloodless, isn't it?