Suffering

[sweetnpetite]

Suffering does not make life not worth living.

This is not ment to be a new topic on abortion, although a comment made there got me thinking, along with some reading of mine and some previous knowlege.

Some people say that we all choose what incarnation we take, the lives we wish to be born into. Naturally someone would say that this is rediculous- who would choose a life of destitution, starvation, torture, slavery.

But the problem is that when we see these things, it tends to be all we see. I just read something about a woman with a good family, a good husband, a prominant position in society, she cared for the hungry, the homeless and the poor. But then she ended up in dying in a consentration camp. Would she have choosen (as an infinant being) to live that life, with the opportunity to help others and be this person even knowing that she would suffer in the end? Naturally we can never know.

All life includes times of suffering, times of gried,and hopefully times of happiness and joy. Would we choose *no life* for ourselves in order to avoid suffering? The statement that sticks out is "there are worse things than not being born" but as I contemplate that, its' like trying to divide by zero. (Taken in the way that I feel they meant it to mean basicly, there are worse things than never existing) For one thing how can you compare something to nothing? I would think that it would be impossible. And for another, even if we could- how would we know? All of us here, have been born, have existed- how would we know what non-existance means or is? We can only assume, naturally. But when we begin to comtemplate what non-existance *is* we must realize that it *isn't* Again, we are dividing by zero.

I am interested in the lives of people who seem to have lived intollerable lives, but despite this, they do tollerate. The history of slavery perhaps is poorer for the fact that what most of us know about it is *only* that the african's were slaves. What of there lives- although terrible, they must have found comfort somewere, and with it, the will to live. True that there families were broken, but they must have found and formed families, communities with what, and who were available. I know this is true, even though I have found only glimmers of evidence.

In places in the world that life is the worst, and most seemingly hopeless, people continue to eat, search for shelter, and try to keep themselves alive, even onto the next generation.

When you see starving children begging for food, do you give them food- knowing that it will only prolong there suffering, that tomorrow they will be hungry again- or do you 'cure' there suffering, put them out of there misery? Most, I think would offer food. And that would be considered compationate, even though as I said, you have prolonged misery and suffering.

Suffering is something that we should try to aliviate whenever possible, but I do not believe that it makes life not worth living. This is not meant as an inditement of anybody who has put a dog down, or removed a loved one from life support, or even one who's had an abortion. So please do not take it that way. It is just a call to re-evaluate our understanding of suffering, our idea that we are entitled to *not suffer.* Suffering happens to all. When we are tempted to ask- Why me!! Maybe we should be thinking, why not me? what makes us different from anybody else who suffers through the exact same thing?

I am not trying to be hard hearted. I think that we should do all we can to alleiviate the suffering of others as well as our own. But even in our suffering, if we come to realize that life is a valuable thing, perhaps and maybe even likely the only thing- that we will be richer for it.

When my grandfather was dying, he asked me to comb his hair. He said he liked having his hair combed. Even though he was in pain, and his life was coming to a close, and he was suffering- he was happy in that moment, and it is a moment that counts. To him, and to me. He also spent time painting, when he was supposed to be too weak to get out of bed. Would it have better for him to have not lived that last year, so near to death, so filled with suffering for him and for us? I don't think so. Because I think he cherished every day that he got to spend with his family, and doing the things that he loved. He held on for a year after being told that he would not live through the night- because he knew that every day, whatever it held, was worth living.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Budda had some things to say about suffering, some of which I agree with and some that I don't. If anybody can explain his teaching here, you might be able to do it more elequantly than me as my brain has switched to the off direction temporarily.

 

[sanchopanza]

Perhaps that would have been better in serialised rant form, broken down so I can be bothered to read the whole thing. But anyway, I think I got the point of what you were saying.

My father, pretentious and consistently wrong that he is, will often at times when somebody is railing against some perceived injustice or suffering will chime in with "the first of the noble truths of the Buddha is 'existence is suffering' I've said this to you before but it doesn't sink in". That kind of pained, existentialist, Calvinist, view of life is quite common and I suppose considering the crappy life he has led over the past 67 years I can't really blame him for that way of looking at things, but I constantly have to remind him he is in fact full of shit.

I'm sure I had more to say than this but I've just plum forgotten it now. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that existence is not suffering and the purpose of human existence is to prosper and live happily (by the way I am not a Humanist, though it may sound like it).

 

[rgraham666]

Interesting sweet.

As far as birth control goes, Robert A. Heinlein sums up my view best.

Much as we may think and act as individuals, our species is an organism and like all organisms must be pruned ocassionally in order to remain healthy.
The big question is whether this pruning should take place before or after death. Being an incurable sentimentalist I much prefer the former to the latter.
But there are some shamans who think that it is better to die in a war or a plague or in childbirth than never to have lived at all. And they may be right.
But I don't have to like it and I don't.

As far as suffering goes, it's inevitable in an imperfect universe. The tide of time and fortune is going to mean some people don't have enough, some are going to be hurt, deliberately or accidentally, and some will die because of it.

But you do what you can to alleviate it while realising that it will never be enough. There are limits to our power.

In fact, much of the suffering in the world is caused by people who think their power is unlimited.

For me, I live every day, by this motto, "There's enough pain in the universe without us adding to the sum total of it."

 

[sweetnpetite]

I'm sure I had more to say than this but I've just plum forgotten it now. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that existence is not suffering and the purpose of human existence is to prosper and live happily (by the way I am not a Humanist, though it may sound like it).

But- suffering does happen. is life only worth living if you are happy and prosperous? Half the worlds population is living in conditions that most of even most of the poorest in America would consider intollerable. They value there lives, even though it is full of suffering. WE in the US sometimes distain ours, when faced even with the slightest bit.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Interesting sweet.

As far as birth control goes, Robert A. Heinlein sums up my view best.



As far as suffering goes, it's inevitable in an imperfect universe. The tide of time and fortune is going to mean some people don't have enough, some are going to be hurt, deliberately or accidentally, and some will die because of it.

But you do what you can to alleviate it while realising that it will never be enough. There are limits to our power.

In fact, much of the suffering in the world is caused by people who think their power is unlimited.

For me, I live every day, by this motto, "There's enough pain in the universe without us adding to the sum total of it."

Very positive outlook. I definatly I don't believe in adding to the suffering. Nor do I think that saying "Life's not fair" is a good excuse not to do something about it!

I think that nature ballances itself out. When we tamper with it on one end (living longer, childhood immunizations, ect.) we need to ballance it on the other. I definatly believe in birth control, for this reason amoung others. Otherwise we tend to increase rather than increase suffering, as nature will fight back. (ie, too many people,and not enough food or resourses)

We have to realise, even a compationate act, without considering all of the comsequenses and ballancing change, can add to the worlds suffering. that's also why people don't like outsiders showing up and trying to "fix" there problems, lol. Even our problems are part of a delicate ballance and must be 'handled with care' (I think that's kind of like what you said about people thinking they have unlimmited power, even though it's probably not exactly what you were thinking)

I think I had something more to say, but now I can't remember what! Oh well

 

[sanchopanza]

But- suffering does happen. is life only worth living if you are happy and prosperous?

I never tried to deny that suffering doesn't happen or suggest that life is only worth living if you are happy and prosperous.

Half the worlds population is living in conditions that most of even most of the poorest in America would consider intollerable. They value there lives, even though it is full of suffering.

I don't quite get your point, I thought this was evident that I fully realised this. I know that much of the world's population are in dire straights and intolerable suffering I simply made the point that my view of life did not adhere to the view that to exist is to suffer.

WE in the US sometimes distain ours, when faced even with the slightest bit.

Despite irrelevantly living in England I know you are referring not just to the United States but the prosperous West. Yes eerybody suffers in their life at some point and we in our relatively comfortable positions often bitch and complain how bad we have it even though we have it bloody good. But, wasn't it Schopenhauer that said the cure for depression was to observe others who were worse off than you (and this is easy to do, he continued).

That is not quite the point though, I don't think needless compassion is such a great thing as it is often purported to be though using the resources we have in the West to alleviate suffering in other areas of the world. I don't propose sending aid to other countries (leaky bucket theory - pouring water into a leaky bucket just makes it leak faster) but instead helping to create infrastructures and capitalist-democratic systems in which people will be able to prosper. In Zimbabwe it has been suggested by authoritative sources that around 90% of all aid given by the West is siphoned off by Mugabe's compadres. What we should do is topple Mugabe's "rape 'n' robbery" regime and then torture the animal himself for a few years letting it be known throughout the world that despots will not be tolerated. This however is not allowed, we can futilely send aid to poor countries but we can't actually do anything that will help them.

 

[sweetnpetite]

I think that we are mainly in agreeance, and have been able to use each others posts to clarify our ideas

Sorry about that US thing. Yeah, I was being ego-centric. I didn't mean 'we on lit in the us' I just ment we as from my piont of view, or in other words *me* and the others like me (ie, here in the same country) or something like that. I hope that makes sence. Basicly I was thinking *me* but in a broader sence. [huh?? I hope that makes sence!!]

I never tried to deny that suffering doesn't happen or suggest that life is only worth living if you are happy and prosperous.

I don't quite get your point, I thought this was evident that I fully realised this. I know that much of the world's population are in dire straights and intolerable suffering I simply made the point that my view of life did not adhere to the view that to exist is to suffer.

Despite irrelevantly living in England I know you are referring not just to the United States but the prosperous West. Yes eerybody suffers in their life at some point and we in our relatively comfortable positions often bitch and complain how bad we have it even though we have it bloody good. But, wasn't it Schopenhauer that said the cure for depression was to observe others who were worse off than you (and this is easy to do, he continued).

That is not quite the point though, I don't think needless compassion is such a great thing as it is often purported to be though using the resources we have in the West to alleviate suffering in other areas of the world. I don't propose sending aid to other countries (leaky bucket theory - pouring water into a leaky bucket just makes it leak faster) but instead helping to create infrastructures and capitalist-democratic systems in which people will be able to prosper. In Zimbabwe it has been suggested by authoritative sources that around 90% of all aid given by the West is siphoned off by Mugabe's compadres. What we should do is topple Mugabe's "rape 'n' robbery" regime and then torture the animal himself for a few years letting it be known throughout the world that despots will not be tolerated. This however is not allowed, we can futilely send aid to poor countries but we can't actually do anything that will help them.

 

[sanchopanza]

Yup that just about makes sense. Much of what I wrote above I spoke recently while discussing once more with a few people what we would do when we take over the country - we came to the agreement that the first thing we would do is charge into Zimbabwe and hang Mugabe from his testicles. Then we would go on to setting off a few nuclear warheads in Birmingham to warm England up a little and then charging through the rest of the world toppling despotic regimes and crowning ourselves Emperors of the World. Whimsical conversation it was but undercut with the strong belief that the peaceniks in the UN are grossly misguided.

By the way, nice use of language in "agreeance". I'll have to note that one down with "Brumania": the place where brummies live (sorry that's an English joke).

 

[sweetnpetite]

Yup that just about makes sense. Much of what I wrote above I spoke recently while discussing once more with a few people what we would do when we take over the country - we came to the agreement that the first thing we would do is charge into Zimbabwe and hang Mugabe from his testicles. Then we would go on to setting off a few nuclear warheads in Birmingham to warm England up a little and then charging through the rest of the world toppling despotic regimes and crowning ourselves Emperors of the World. Whimsical conversation it was but undercut with the strong belief that the peaceniks in the UN are grossly misguided.

By the way, nice use of language in "agreeance". I'll have to note that one down with "Brumania": the place where brummies live (sorry that's an English joke).

I think I know what your saying. To go even further off topic, I wrote a letter to the editor of our paper about "misguided efforts to help" on the topic of providing clean needles. What's the point of saving someone from AIDS, and letting them destroy there lives with heroin? I guess you can argue that there's more hope for recovery from addiction, than from AIDS- but I think that compationate folk could better spend there time and resourses pushing free (or subsidised) re-hab than free needles.

 

[My Erotic Tail]

Ying and the Yang~

For everything there is an opposite. Suffering
and not suffering. In order to have a bad day
we compare to a good day. In order for there
to be (the sum of zero) there will be life (26 billion+)
The female has generally 10-12 chances to
have a child every year (hince her fertility)
multiplied by years. And as given life. Feel lucky.
Im not sure that this was a question as much
as a chance to share feelings. As one we are but
a drop of water...but banned together we can
make a wave...or plant the seed that will grow
from your thought....smiles....so I recall this...
"Once upon a time.' look at you and smile........
there once was a shaolin priest named Da Mo...
who ventured out from his temple in search of
enlightenment to carry back to his fellow brotherin..
and share learnings from the world.....he was traveling
one night when it was raining and getting dark...
he was wet, cold and tired as he found his way along
in the dark. He came to a cave. Well the gods must be
smileing on me he thought as he made his way into
this cave out of the rain. His feet stepped and crunching
sounds came from stepping on crunchy things but made
his way in farther thinking it must be wood blown
into the entrance cause not to much farther in his feet
felt soft straw that he balled up and layed down on in
this pitch black damp cave. He fell asleep from his weary
travel thinking that the gods have taken care of him this
evening and gave him shelter.....in the middle of the night
Da Mo woke up thirsty and listened as he heard water
dripping so he felt his way over to the sound and felt
what he thought was a gobblet of liquid. The water was
dripping into some container that he quickly smelled
and tasted and quinched his thirst. the gods have truely
blessed me this night he thought as he went back to
sleep. .................The next morning he awoke to
see that the crunching was bones he had stepped across,
and the straw was hair of long dead and left. and the
container of water was a skull that he had drank from.
well Da Mo got a little ill and very upset....but he went
back to his temple enlightened from a lesson he learned.
"Know what that lesson was??????????"................
......ENEMY'S OF THE MIND..................every thing was a
blessing till his mind had told him that it was not.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Re: Ying and the Yang~

......every thing was a
blessing till his mind had told him that it was not.

Ever notice how we lable some weather 'bad'

Children love any weather, snow, rain sun. there is no bad weather (maybe thunderstorms cuz they tend to scare)

Everything is a blessing, until your mind tells you that it's not. I like that.

 

[seldomseen]

from what i gather in the initial post....the realm question was whether if we could somehow see how much suffering we would have, and could choose no life if we wanted would we.


my thoughts on this delema ( sp?) is what if in my life i had more than my share of suffering, but one of the offsprings ( children, grandchild, etc) would create a cure for some horrible disease. ( which i wouldnt know, until they were born). Would it be moral for me to choose not to exist to save myself some suffering, yet deprieve future generations of a cure for a terrible disease.

i dont think so. life is ful of choices and forks in the road, is it destiny or chance that makes us choose, i dont know. all i know is i hope im wise enough that if i make a choice and it turns out wrong that the next time i can make the other one.

onther thought is if i could choose, based on whether i knew if i would suffer or not, lets say the suffering would happen in the middle of my life, i would then be depriving my parents of the joys and heartaches that i gave them as a kid, would that be fair.

i think i lost my train of thought and hopefully didnt stray to far.

 

[Guest]

Just a comment. On the HBO series, Six Feet Under, one of the sons had a life-threatening illness and suffered by himself. Finally everyone finds out, lastly his mother. He explains that he didn't want her to suffer and worry so he kept if from her. She sighs sadly and says something like, "Oh, but think of all that time when I could have been loving you more."

Sweet, you cannot look at human suffering superficially, no matter its face, even on a global scale, and certainly not philosophically (unless you're into that type of thinking). Sorrow is a profound element of our lives and we each must make of it what we will. That's not to say we shouldn't try to alleviate suffering, but like any human life, the effects can be profoundly unknown.

If I am frank and true with myself I can say that I've had little happiness in my 57 years compared to real happiness. The good bits were worth it, and I hope to find more.

Perdita

 

[seldomseen]

Just a comment. On the HBO series, Six Feet Under, one of the sons had a life-threatening illness and suffered by himself. Finally everyone finds out, lastly his mother. He explains that he didn't want her to suffer and worry so he kept if from her. She sighs sadly and says something like, "Oh, but think of all that time when I could have been loving you more."

Sweet, you cannot look at human suffering superficially, no matter its face, even on a global scale, and certainly not philosophically (unless you're into that type of thinking). Sorrow is a profound element of our lives and we each must make of it what we will. That's not to say we shouldn't try to alleviate suffering, but like any human life, the effects can be profoundly unknown.

If I am frank and true with myself I can say that I've had little happiness in my 57 years compared to real happiness. The good bits were worth it, and I hope to find more.


Perdita

well put. when my father pasted a few years ago, it was a sudden and tramatic experience that i never would wish on anyone, but i wouldn't trade all the memories to spare myself of that bad experience.

 

[kellycummings]

Life's a bitch then you die.

There ya go. All summed up nice and neat. People who complain about suffering are usually the ones who should not be complaining. The ones keeping quiet are the ones that suffer the most. They simply know that life is like that sometimes. Get over it and move on.
Just my opinion.

 

[gauchecritic]

In a first-aid class I took many years ago, the instructor asked "Of two accident victims who would you help first? The guy crying and screaming about his obviously broken leg or the boy with scared eyes saying nothing?"

On an 'outward' bound course, sleeping in tents in the early winter, the group leader said "Don't moan because you're cold, someone somewhere is cold and wet. Cold and wet? Someone is cold, wet and hungry. Cold, wet and hungry? Someone somewhere is cold, wet, hungry and sober."

I'll refrain from mentioning that which would disturb you, there are those here know to what I refer. Suffice to say; given the option, I'd make exactly the same choice.

I think it used to be in Perdita's sig. "So long as we can say 'this is the worst'. "

Gauche

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Buddhism believes that ego is illusion: that each of us is already everything but that we’re kept from realizing this by the illusion of individual ego and the idea that we have an immortal soul. Buddha did teach that living was suffering, and that the root of all suffering is desire, which is a function of ego. It’s possible to transcend your own desires and so go beyond the notions of self-ness, suffering, and ego, at which point you join with the Godhead of the universe and see all life for what it is: illusion and ego.

As long as you deny this transcendence and your essential Godliness, your idea of self dooms you to rebirth and another round of suffering. The idea behind Buddhism is that you can escape this endless wheel of rebirth. If you do manage to achieve the truth of non-ego, you see that everything is the same: holy and empty.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

I think it used to be in Perdita's sig. "So long as we can say 'this is the worst'. "

The worst is not / So long as we can say 'This is the worst.'  —King Lear, IV.i

 

[raphy]

Life's a bitch then you die.

There ya go. All summed up nice and neat. People who complain about suffering are usually the ones who should not be complaining. The ones keeping quiet are the ones that suffer the most. They simply know that life is like that sometimes. Get over it and move on.
Just my opinion.

Hear, hear

"When you're done feeling sorry for yourself, the front door's that way" - Bruce Willis, The Last Boy Scout

 

[dr_mabeuse]

One of my favorite stories involves a bunch of Jewish rabbis in the middle ages who held a trial to decide whether God did good or evil when he created man. They assembled a court or the most learned men and summoned the Almighty (who chose not to appear) and they debated the matter for days, pointing out that He knew from the start that man would fall into sin and end up leading lives that were nasty, brutish, and short and filled with suffering and woe.

The debate was pretty heated, and the result was equivocal. They decided that it would have probably been better had God not created man, but since he had, the best we could do was live by his laws and hope for His mercy.

---dr.M.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

BTW, the idea that life is not all about suffering is rather recent and pretty much a Western idea. It remains to be proven.

---dr.M.

 

[Guest]

Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

One book that had a profound effect on my life when I was in my 30s, was Oscar Wilde's De Profundis; the title was used for publication but it is 'merely' the letter he wrote from prison to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover. I have yet to read anyone else who understands and expresses the truth of sorrow as well as Wilde. This is a long post, but I urge you to read it through, it's well worth it. (I've put one special line in bold.)

- Perdita
----------

. . . Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods, and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. …

For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. … The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again to-morrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I am writing, and in this manner writing. …

Prosperity, pleasure and success, may be rough of grain and common in fibre, but sorrow is the most sensitive of all created things. There is nothing that stirs in the whole world of thought to which sorrow does not vibrate in terrible and exquisite pulsation. The thin beaten-out leaf of tremulous gold that chronicles the direction of forces the eye cannot see is in comparison coarse. It is a wound that bleeds when any hand but that of love touches it, and even then must bleed again, though not in pain.

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground. Some day people will realise what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do, - and natures like his can realise it.

… I have lain in prison for nearly two years. Out of my nature has come wild despair; an abandonment to grief that was piteous even to look at; terrible and impotent rage; bitterness and scorn; anguish that wept aloud; misery that could find no voice; sorrow that was dumb. I have passed through every possible mood of suffering. Better than Wordsworth himself I know what Wordsworth meant when he said - 'Suffering is permanent, obscure, and dark And has the nature of infinity.'

But while there were times when I rejoiced in the idea that my sufferings were to be endless, I could not bear them to be without meaning. Now I find hidden somewhere away in my nature something that tells me that nothing in the whole world is meaningless, and suffering least of all. That something hidden away in my nature, like a treasure in a field, is Humility.
It is the last thing left in me, and the best: the ultimate discovery at which I have arrived, the starting-point for a fresh development. It has come to me right out of myself, so I know that it has come at the proper time. It could not have come before, nor later. Had any one told me of it, I would have rejected it. Had it been brought to me, I would have refused it. As I found it, I want to keep it. I must do so. It is the one thing that has in it the elements of life, of a new life, VITA NUOVA for me. Of all things it is the strangest. One cannot acquire it, except by surrendering everything that one has. It is only when one has lost all things, that one knows that one possesses it. …

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions, not for laws. But while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of heaven, but the horror of hell also. When I think about religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who CANNOT believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice empty of wine. Every thing to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith. It has sown its martyrs, it should reap its saints, and praise God daily for having hidden Himself from man. But whether it be faith or agnosticism, it must be nothing external to me. Its symbols must be of my own creating. Only that is spiritual which makes its own form. If I may not find its secret within myself, I shall never find it: if I have not got it already, it will never come to me.

Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system. But, somehow, I have got to make both of these things just and right to me. And exactly as in Art one is only concerned with what a particular thing is at a particular moment to oneself, so it is also in the ethical evolution of one's character. I have got to make everything that has happened to me good for me. The plank bed, the loathsome food, the hard ropes shredded into oakum till one's finger-tips grow dull with pain, the menial offices with which each day begins and finishes, the harsh orders that routine seems to necessitate, the dreadful dress that makes sorrow grotesque to look at, the silence, the solitude, the shame - each and all of these things I have to transform into a spiritual experience. There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul. ...

I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned suffering and sorrow of every kind. I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible: to treat them, that is to say, as modes of imperfection. They were not part of my scheme of life. They had no place in my philosophy. My mother, who knew life as a whole, used often to quote to me Goethe's lines - written by Carlyle in a book he had given her years ago, and translated by him, I fancy, also:- 'Who never ate his bread in sorrow, Who never spent the midnight hours Weeping and waiting for the morrow, - He knows you not, ye heavenly powers.' …

I now see that sorrow, being the supreme emotion of which man is capable, is at once the type and test of all great art. What the artist is always looking for is the mode of existence in which soul and body are one and indivisible: in which the outward is expressive of the inward: in which form reveals. Of such modes of existence there are not a few: youth and the arts preoccupied with youth may serve as a model for us at one moment: at another we may like to think that, in its subtlety and sensitiveness of impression, its suggestion of a spirit dwelling in external things and making its raiment of earth and air, of mist and city alike, and in its morbid sympathy of its moods, and tones, and colours, modern landscape art is realising for us pictorially what was realised in such plastic perfection by the Greeks. Music, in which all subject is absorbed in expression and cannot be separated from it, is a complex example, and a flower or a child a simple example, of what I mean; but sorrow is the ultimate type both in life and art.

Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is always sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. Truth in art is not any correspondence between the essential idea and the accidental existence; it is not the resemblance of shape to shadow, or of the form mirrored in the crystal to the form itself; it is no echo coming from a hollow hill, any more than it is a silver well of water in the valley that shows the moon to the moon and Narcissus to Narcissus. Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the outward rendered expressive of the inward: the soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit. For this reason there is no truth comparable to sorrow. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. Other things may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain.

More than this, there is about sorrow an intense, an extraordinary reality. I have said of myself that I was one who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age. There is not a single wretched man in this wretched place along with me who does not stand in symbolic relation to the very secret of life. For the secret of life is suffering. It is what is hidden behind everything. When we begin to live, what is sweet is so sweet to us, and what is bitter so bitter, that we inevitably direct all our desires towards pleasures, and seek not merely for a 'month or twain to feed on honeycomb,' but for all our years to taste no other food, ignorant all the while that we may really be starving the soul.

I remember talking once on this subject to one of the most beautiful personalities I have ever known: a woman, whose sympathy and noble kindness to me, both before and since the tragedy of my imprisonment, have been beyond power and description; one who has really assisted me, though she does not know it, to bear the burden of my troubles more than any one else in the whole world has, and all through the mere fact of her existence, through her being what she is - partly an ideal and partly an influence: a suggestion of what one might become as well as a real help towards becoming it; a soul that renders the common air sweet, and makes what is spiritual seem as simple and natural as sunlight or the sea: one for whom beauty and sorrow walk hand in hand, and have the same message. On the occasion of which I am thinking I recall distinctly how I said to her that there was enough suffering in one narrow London lane to show that God did not love man, and that wherever there was any sorrow, though but that of a child, in some little garden weeping over a fault that it had or had not committed, the whole face of creation was completely marred. I was entirely wrong. She told me so, but I could not believe her. I was not in the sphere in which such belief was to be attained to. Now it seems to me that love of some kind is the only possible explanation of the extraordinary amount of suffering that there is in the world. I cannot conceive of any other explanation. I am convinced that there is no other, and that if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love, because in no other way could the soul of man, for whom the world was made, reach the full stature of its perfection. Pleasure for the beautiful body, but pain for the beautiful soul.

 

[gauchecritic]

Thankyou very much thou very Perdita. You are a constant source of sources and inspiration. These are what I would have emboldened.

while I see that there is nothing wrong in what one does, I see that there is something wrong in what one becomes. It is well to have learned that.

if the world has indeed, as I have said, been built of sorrow, it has been built by the hands of love.

Quoting Oscar should be a school graduation requirement.

I have nothing to declare except my insipid humour.

Gauche

 

[Guest]

I have nothing to declare except my insipid humour.

Bless you for that, gauche Gauche.

Perdita