Some people hang onto bitterness because of malice toward others, toward God, or toward themselves. Others hang on long after the original impetus is spent because there is a morose pleasure in sucking at dregs.
But there are yet others who hang onto bitterness because they think letting go would betray some cossetted conviction. Recently I read of a novelist who perished in rancor just because he thought most of the world to be morons.
Someone of that sort might think that to let go of his acrimony he would have to close his eyes, deny the truth, pretend not to see that they were morons. That might have seemed to him a coward’s way out.
But he was shirking a greater courage. A man of greater bravery might have been intrepid enough to love morons even knowing they were morons. Loving them might have given him the valor to discover that some of them had unsuspected non-moronic qualities which were different than his own. Ultimately he might have gathered the fortitude to face what was moronic in himself; perhaps, were it possible, to overcome it.