. . . Happy is that death which thrusts
itself not upon men in their pleasant years,
yet comes to them at the often repeated
cry of their sorrow.
Sad is it how death turns away from the
unhappy with so deaf an ear,
and will not close, cruel, the eyes
that weep.
Ill is it to trust to Fortune's fickle
bounty, and while yet she smiled upon me,
the hour of gloom had well-nigh
overwhelmed my head.
Now has the cloud put off its alluring
face,
wherefore without scruple my life drags
out its wearying delays.
Why, O my friends, did you so often
puff me up, telling me that I was fortunate?
For he that is fallen low did never
firmly stand.
— from Book
1, Poem 1
With
sadness can come despair, and with despair can come a loss of the will to live.
Suffering becomes so savage in it intensity that the very cessation of human
existence itself can seem preferable to struggling any further. The agony may
be compounded by the fact that we might feel ready for death, but death does
net seem ready to take us.
I have
sadly known the feeling, and I have also learned to recognize it in others. It seems
like more than anyone should ever have to bear, though the good I have somehow
managed to extract from it is a far greater willingness to feel empathy for the
pain in others. If you have the dubious distinction of ever having felt so low,
you will surely never again be able to easily ignore or dismiss someone else’s
misery.
When I
was working in social services, I would regularly help out with a support group
for clients who had suffered great personal loss. I recall one fellow who
seemed to be in much the same state of mind as the one Boethius writes about. He
was not only in the advanced stages of illness, but he had lost all of his
income, and been abandoned by most everyone he had considered a friend. On a
particular day he seemed even more weighed down than usual, and he expressed
how he had an overwhelming sense that he wanted his life to end, even as it
also made him feel deeply ashamed that he was thinking in this way.
Another
participant immediately spoke up, and suggested that it was surely just a
matter of willpower, of facing the pain with conviction and moving on from the
disappointments. It would eventually get better, she said.
I know
her words were meant to be helpful, but the look on the man’s face spoke
volumes. It wasn’t that he lacked willpower, or that he didn’t want to face the
pain and get over the loss, or that he didn’t desperately hope it could get
better. He simply didn’t know how to do these things. Wishing harder, or being
tough, or ignoring the pain would not make it all go away.
I can’t
simply tell someone in agony to stop feeling it. It is not only the presence of
suffering, but the sense that there is no meaning or purpose behind it all, and
that all the things in life that seemed to provide security are now completely
unreliable. Good luck simply seems to have become bad luck, with no discernible
rhyme or reason. One feels betrayed by circumstances.
I could
tell the man that I understood, but I would hardly blame him if he didn’t
believe me. I myself had been advised time and time again to stick it out, and
that everything would finally clear itself up.
In the
end, the only way I ever found to make any of it better was to rebuild
entirely. Yes, I had fallen, and yes, I had not been standing on a firm
foundation. But maybe the problem wasn’t with what the world was doing, but
with the way I was thinking about what the world was doing. Perhaps I was only
seeing what was bad because I hadn’t been looking for what was good, in the
right way and in the right places.
The process
Boethius will soon undergo in the text is, I suspect, the same one that any of
us must undergo to start making things right. It entails a serious reevaluation
of priorities.
Written in 2/2015
Image: Philosophy visits Boethius, 12th century manuscript.
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