M. It may be said, on the other side, “Who is so mad as to grieve of his own accord?” Pain proceeds from nature, which you must submit to, say they, agreeably to what even your own Crantor teaches, for it presses and gains upon you unavoidably, and cannot possibly be resisted.
So that the very same Oileus, in Sophocles, who had before comforted Telamon on the death of Ajax, on hearing of the death of his own son, is broken-hearted. On this alteration of his mind we have these lines:
“Show me the man so well by wisdom taught
That what he charges to another’s fault,
When like affliction doth himself betide,
True to his own wise counsel will abide.”
Now, when they urge these things, their endeavor is to prove that nature is absolutely and wholly irresistible; and yet the same people allow that we take greater grief on ourselves than nature requires. What madness is it, then, in us to require the same from others? But there are many reasons for our taking grief on us.
The first is from the opinion of some evil, on the discovery and certainty of which grief comes of course.
Besides, many people are persuaded that they are doing something very acceptable to the dead when they lament bitterly over them.
To these may be added a kind of womanish superstition, in imagining that when they have been stricken by the afflictions sent by the Gods, to acknowledge themselves afflicted and humbled by them is the readiest way of appeasing them.
But most men appear to be unaware what contradictions these things are full of. They commend those who die calmly, but they blame those who can bear the loss of another with the same calmness, as if it were possible that it should be true, as is occasionally said in love speeches, that anyone can love another more than himself.
There is, indeed, something excellent in this, and, if you examine it, something no less just than true, that we love those who ought to be most dear to us as well as we love ourselves; but to love them more than ourselves is absolutely impossible; nor is it desirable in friendship that I should love my friend more than myself, or that he should love me so; for this would occasion much confusion in life, and break in upon all the duties of it.
—from Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 3.29
From my own struggles, I know full well how the assumption that grief is an irresistible force becomes the very cause of my capitulation; once I tell myself it can’t be done, I have already doomed myself to failure.
Behind it all, I am working from the false premise that man is essentially a creature ruled by his passions, not a being also endowed with reason and will, which permit him to order his feelings according to his understanding of meaning and purpose.
Such a reduction of human nature to the merely appetitive, as expressed in the popular sentiment of “If it feels good, do it!”, reveals itself in many other aspects of life. For its many technical advancements, our society is quite adept at treating people more like beasts than men, and so it comes as little surprise that we end up acting more like devils than angels.
Long after the befuddlement of adolescence, for example, I remain amazed at how many adults still take it for granted that people must inevitably be sexually promiscuous, regardless of their judgments, because the desire is somehow invincible. The best we can do, they say, is to suppress the consequences.
We end up doing much the same when it comes to sadness, supposing that the emotion must make the call, and can only be numbed by medications or the diversion of other powerful emotions. There is, tragically, no other solution when defining a man by his circumstances means that any loss is viewed as a negation of his worth,
The confusion gets us into many contradictions, including the way we hypocritically scold others for being depressed, while still refusing to “get over it” when our own hearts are broken, or the tendency to praise one kind of constancy while condemning another, depending on how it fits our own conveniences and moods. Since the theory was never coherent, it immediately falls apart when applied in practice.
While the specific cause may not always be readily apparent, there are always reasons for our particular emotional states. To despair of an answer is to abandon the power of judgment itself, and to accept grief without question, as with the existential dread of our time, is to lay down our arms before the battle has even begun.
Sometimes we are desolate because we are mistaken about the source of the true good, or because we feel that we have a duty to mourn, or because we believe that expressing grief will win us Divine favor. Usually, however, we bemoan our fates because we have simply chosen not to reflect on who we are and why we are here—we are asleep on the watch.
Having subjected myself to the agony of lost love, I can further attest how it is a noble and wonderful thing to love another without condition, and yet it is a degraded and terrible thing to believe that a love for another demands hating oneself. Despite the clinging habit of wallowing in defeat, I recognize why my own choices, and no one else’s, are the root of my melancholy. Such growth is a proof of how the pain of loss doesn’t have to be terminal.
—Reflection written in 12/1998
IMAGE: Gustave Moreau, The Death of Sappho (c. 1875)
