Boethius, The Consolation 2.11

Then I answered her, “Cherisher of all the virtues, you tell me but the truth. I cannot deny my rapid successes and my prosperity. But it is such remembrances that torment me more than others. For of all suffering from Fortune, the unhappiest misfortune is to have known a happy fortune.”

“But,” said Philosophy, “you are paying the penalty for your mistaken expectations, and with this you cannot justly charge your life's circumstances. If you are affected by this empty name of Fortune's gift of happiness, you must listen while I recall how many and how great are your sources of happiness. And thus, if you have possessed that which is the most precious among all Fortune's gifts, and if that is still safe and unharmed in your possession, you will never, while you keep these better gifts, be able to justly charge Fortune with unkindness.

“Firstly, your wife's father, Symmachus, is still living and hale, and what more precious glory has the human race than him? And he, because your worth is undiminished and your life still so valuable, is mourning for the injustice you suffer, this man who is wholly made up of wisdom and virtue.

“Again, your wife lives, a woman whose character is full of virtue, whose modesty excels its kind, a woman who (to put in a word the gifts she brought you) is like her father. She lives, and, hating this life, for your sake alone she clings to it. Herein only will I yield to allow you unhappiness. She pines with tears and grief through her longing for you.

“Need I speak of your sons who have both been consuls, and whose lives, as when they were boys, are yet bright with the character of their grandfather and their father?

“Wherefore, since mortals desire exceedingly to keep a hold on life, how happy you should be, if you knew but your blessings, since you have still what none doubts to be dearer than life itself? Wherefore now dry your tears. Fortune's hatred has not yet been so great as to destroy all your holds upon happiness. The tempest that is fallen upon you is not too great for you. Your anchors hold yet firm, and they should keep ever nigh to you confidence in the present and hope for future time.” . . .

—from Book 2, Prose 4

In reply to Lady Philosophy’s claim that life has already given him far more of value than he thinks, Boethius raises a point I have very often considered myself. The greatest pain, he suggests, is not merely in lacking something good, but in having once had something good, and then losing it. The haunting memory of a blessing now gone can seem too much to bear.

I know this feeling all too well. I will sometimes tell myself that I can still manage to bear all other sorts of suffering, however painful, but that I cannot seem to manage the agony of having lost something deeply precious to me. This is especially the case when it was so joyful and fulfilling at the time, yet I now know that nothing could ever be done to get it back. I will struggle intensely to come to terms with the permanent absence of what once was present. It cannot be recovered.

When my son was about four years old, he had a toy fighter plane he took everywhere with him. He once left it sitting on a bench in the playground, and though he realized he had forgotten it within only a few minutes, it was gone by the time I ran back to retrieve it. Some other child had surely taken it home. The look of intense sadness on his face broke my heart, because I wished to spare him such a sense of loss in life. It seemed such a little thing, but I could tell how much it weighed on his young mind. No other toy, however fancy, could take its place. He would never fly it all around the room again, and I would miss that glowing face he had as he zipped through the house or the yard.

My father is an incredibly strong man, but one need only mention his old Rover 2000 to bring a tear to his eye. He loved that car so dearly, having picked it up straight from the factory at Solihull, and driven it all over Europe before bringing it home to America. The bungling of an incompetent local mechanic meant he had to give it up, and again, even as it was only a thing, it hurts him just as much now as it did fifty years ago.

I was once shattered by the loss of someone I thought of as my dearest friend. It was not because of any epic circumstances, but simply from being unceremoniously dropped one day, never to be acknowledged or considered again. I knew I would have to go on, and I learned deeply from my own life-defining mistake, but not a day passes where I am not weighed down by a profound sense of irredeemable loss. The remembrance of things past is the torment.

Lady Philosophy responds to Boethius, and to all of us who have ever felt this way, that the problem is never from what happens, but from our expectations about what happens. Slowly but surely, she is shifting the basic question about happiness and misery from the power of events to the power of our attitudes about events. If we ourselves are the ones who decided that Fortune made all the difference, do we have any right to then double back and question her ways?

She has already said that if Fortune is measured by a balance sheet of debits and credits, Boethius would still seem to come out ahead, and now she adds that while he might have lost things that were valuable to him, the most precious gifts are still within his reach. After all, doesn’t he still have the shining example of his father-in-law, the dedication of his wife, and his pride in his sons?

I have often been frustrated when people advise me that I still have so much, even when I myself feel like I have nothing left to hold on to. I imagine Boethius must be feeling something similar. Though Lady Philosophy is still applying only the mildest temporary relief, and has yet to propose a more powerful cure, she is asking Boethius to begin considering that it isn’t really Fortune who is to blame. After all, we seem to be getting exactly what we asked for when we follow Fortune. Perhaps we should look for something different, something that depends less on different sorts and degrees of receiving and possessing?

Written in 7/2015

IMAGE: Vincent van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity's Gate) (1890)