Ask any lay person to recite a Shakespearean soliloquy, and I'd wager eight out of ten people would start with "To be or not to be." That speech is to Shakespearean literature what the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth are to classical music. It's strange, perhaps, that one of the best known and most cherished passages in the English language is an extended meditation on suicide, one that takes a fairly agnostic position on the subject--it'd be nice to try, but the risks seem kind of high. Personally, there are only three Shakespeare passages I can quote more than a few lines of without looking at the script: 1) To be or not to be; 2) "Out, out brief candle," from Macbeth; and 3) The "seven ages of man," from As You Like it.
Curiosity about death and suicide pervades the first of these three soliloquies; the second one from Macbeth is imbued with a nihilism that welcomes a coming death. The third, after a number of comical references, ends with terrible force by describing the end of human existence: "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans...everything."
Shakespeare scholars warn us not to read any character's words as the real thoughts of Shakespeare. The term "negative capability" comes from Keats' reading of Shakespeare. It means, among other things, Shakespeare's ability to lose himself in his characters, so it's impossible to tell where the author's real sympathies lie. But even if those passages in Shakespeare that talk about suicide or question the meaning of life aren't meant to be met with full acceptance, it's hard to deny that these passages are among the ones that hit us in the face the hardest when reading Shakespeare. They're the ones that knock us down with their truth. When people comment today with amazement at how someone writing more than 400 years ago understood people so well, I imagine they are thinking of passages like this.
"Soft suicidality"; How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.
I'm not suicidal. (Really, Karen--you don't have to worry!) I just don't enjoy life that much, and often find it nearly beyond my ability to manage, in spite of my good fortune. I realize I have it very, very good compared to most humans born into the world today and throughout history. I ought to be enjoying myself more. It's an affront, perhaps, to the fates to not enjoy my good fortune more than I do. If it makes you feel any better, my own guilt about the fact that I don't enjoy my good fortune more is itself one of the things that robs me of my joy. But I think life ought to offer more than just relative gratefulness, more than simply realizing that I'm not a sex slave or a Murle child in South Sudan or a North Korean prisoner of conscience. Life ought to be something to be grateful for in absolute terms.
My good fortune does not mean the world is good
I know better than anyone the good hand I was dealt. I have great parents. I have a really nice family. Everyone around me, outside the province of Mrs. Heretic's teeth, has wonderful health. I'm in the upper-middle-class in income, even if I manage to find new and inventive ways to squander that income.
And just because I haven't faced the worst this world has to offer doesn't mean I don't understand how horrible it can be and the fate I've been lucky to avoid. I have what you might call a long and intimate second-hand knowledge of just how horrifying the game can get for some people.
But telling me to be thankful because the really awful things didn't happen to me personally seems like some strange cousin of Stockholm Syndrome. To whom should I be thankful? To the God/Universe/Fate that allows some children to be born into slavery but not me personally? The fact that it happens at all should make us question to goodness of things. Falling to my knees to give thanks that things aren't as bad for me personally as they could be is what happens in the Book of Job. God terrifies Job, rather than giving an answer as to why the wicked suffer, and eventually, Job is frightened into stopping his questions. Might makes right.
I'll eat your pumpkin pie, just quit telling me to be thankful
There's another element to it. Telling me that I've got it better than most people is like the teacher who calls on you to give an answer, but right before you give your answer, the teacher says, "This is an easy one." Suddenly, all your confidence melts away. You can't win now. If you get it right, it was an easy one. If you miss it, you're a total moron. This is one reason why I get so annoyed with those people in my social media who keep posting that video with the condescending description, "for the people who still don't understand white privilege." It's not that I don't understand it. It's an easy idea. And it's not that I don't think it exists. It's that it's really not a helpful idea to me. All it makes me feel like is that my life is the "easy question," and if I do well, I was supposed to, and if I mess up, I'm double the screw-up anyone else is. In this sense, my blessings are...well, not curses, but less blessed, anyhow. I hate being told my life is an easy question, because the answer sure doesn't seem to be coming easy to me. EVEN THOUGH YES, BEING WHITE, MALE, AND STRAIGHT DOES MAKE IT EASIER. It's still hard for me. Just because others are doing advanced differential calculus doesn't mean I find algebra easy.
But Thanksgiving as we tend to practice it asks us to reflect on these very advantages we privileged folk have. You might as well have a holiday called "All the Reasons you Ought to be Doing Better Than You Are Day."
Taking time to realize that we've got it pretty good--and most people in America are probably in this category--might help us to keep from catastrophizing our problems. It might be good for our mental health and happiness to some extent. Realizing that the latest unexpected expense setting me back isn't a calamity on the level of civil war or famine can help keep me from dwelling too much on it. So to the extent that "Thanksgiving" is calling for an attitude of balance, fine.
It is DEFINITELY important to say thank you to the people in our lives who make it better, both for our own good and also out of just plain politeness.
But I am tired of being told to make generalized, omni-directional thankfulness a perpetual attitude.
Life is hard. If it's not hard for you, I'd guess you don't think about it too much. Good for you. If that's true, feel free to ooze all the thankfulness you want. But the ubiquity of sentiments like those of Hamlet or Macbeth seem to me like a pretty good indication that it has always been recognized that life is a struggle, a struggle so trying it's not entirely clear that it's worth the trouble.
When I eat too much good food this year, surrounded by the people who keep me on the affirmative side of life being just good enough to keep going, I'll count myself incredibly lucky. But lucky doesn't mean thankful.
Yeah, you got me - I was already trying to figure out a "how do I give a 'you are heard' without again sounding like a crisis line worker?" when I came across your assurance.
ReplyDeleteThing is, I'm in pretty much the same boat as you, except I have truly squandered away all my advantages so I deserve it. A therapist once told me, "Just because other people have it worse than you, doesn't mean you don't have pain." I told her she was an ass and slammed out of her office, fueled by decades of exactly the attitude you cite.
But it's been much worse recently. I'm enraged by the corruption and greed that's become the signature of this year, the skewed standards of accountability, and the realization that nobody with the power to act is going to act - that after 230 years, the
Constitution has been turned to trash simply by lack of any sense of decency.
I'm grateful for the one thing that makes me better off than you - I don't have kids. I don't have to worry what they're going to have to deal with in coming years.
And while I'm here I may as well throw in a few semi-responsive replies to a couple of older posts - I had no idea drinking helped with foreign languages. I'm making a half-hearted effort to learn ancient Greek (I've never been able to learn a conversational language, much to my dismay; it's like math, it's just not there. And oddly, though the growth mindset people won't tell you this, language, music, and math affinity tend to cluster together). Maybe I should get some beer. Nah, I'm more a vodka gal.
I hate reading dialect, but that's just because it's fairly uncommon, and it's uncommon because people hate reading it and so writers don't use it. Thing is, it isn't the dialect itself, but the notation, at least for me. Check out "The Mother" by LaToya Watkins
(it's not online but here's my post : https://sloopie72.wordpress.com/2015/02/25/pushcart-2015-latoya-watkins-the-mother-from-ruminate-29/ ) used a kind of "implied dialect" that I was quite fond of - I "heard" it in dialect, "without the apostrophes" as I said. Sort of like the contemporary trend of leaving out quotation marks. It takes some extra work to leave the right guideposts, but it can work. Your solution of using writing, and the character acknowledging use of a different register, is another effective way to convey voice without the annoyance. This is the stuff about writing that I love.
Have a happy Thanksgiving, even if you aren't thankful (oh, come on, you gotta admit, it's kinda funny in this year when everything we're thankful for stands to be taken away - right down to the internet).
Interesting you lumped music, math, and language. I usually think of the conversational part of language like playing a piano. It's a lot of building muscle memory. I think moderate alcohol only helps with that part of language, and only be removing inhibition. So it probably wouldn't help with classical Greek. But it never hurts to try!
DeleteI find that by refusing the easy platitudes about gratefulness, I'm left with a small, strong core of truly beautiful things that I feel genuine love for. These are the things that continue to tie me to this world, the things I fear to lose or see lost in the world. I think this is what the best writing does--it strips away all the bullshit we build our life on. Whatever is left is what's really worth caring about.
Happy Thanksgiving to you, too. Thanks to you for reading and commenting.
This is such a modern obsession. Life sucks. Next?
ReplyDeleteIt's just that the more privileged might be even more bored. No one ever mentions that. If you're some ignorant troglodyte, perhaps just booze and sex and boredom is bad, but you don't give a hoot about much else. If you're bourgeois and privileged and lack a yacht, you simply realize that you *should* care about something else, but that's often lacking. And life without television or other distractions is fundamentally tedious. But the comfortable can wring their hands over the problem, and even make of it a kind of literary pose or genre. Life sucks. Next?
Do you think this is a modern obsession? I'm really asking. You have a better sense of Western cultural thought as a whole than I do. I thought that "life might not have much of a point" was a perennial idea, rather than a modern one. I know it's in Ecclesiastes and Job.
DeleteYou're very likely right that it becomes more obvious the more privilege you have. The writer of Ecclesiastes writes about vanity of vanities only after trying all the good things in life. Maybe the less you have, the more you can believe that you'd be happy if only you had ____. The more things you obtain, and the more you don't find happiness, the more you become suspect of your own material well-being. Not that this stops anyone from wanting material well-being, just that you become more cynical about it.
I think life is generally tedious, but perhaps moderns are more at a loss regarding what to do with leisure, the more they have of it, or the more we think we should have it. Leisure for what, if purpose is absent? I don't know, but The Myth of Sisyphus strikes me as particularly modern in its concerns and outlook. I'm no expert but I do not see so much handwringing as a genre. I don't read Job or Ecclesiastes that way: the former strikes me more as casting doubt on temporal goods. I don't know what to make of Job because of its initial set-up as a divine bet. Job is ultimately rewarded.
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