Self Aware

Notes on Our Search for an Explanation and Remedy for Resignation – The Marginalian

The thing about life is that it happens, that we can never stop it. Even forgiveness, with all its basic power, will never bend the arrow of time, it can only save the hole it makes in the heart. Despair, which visits everyone in full life, is simply a palpable tremor of resignation in the face of an irreparable life event. “There is no love of life without despair of life,” wrote Albert Camus – a simple equation, a math we spend our lives studying. Comfort is the abacus from which we learn – this small and powerful act of resistance to let go, this reaching out of charity for meaning when the unbiased hand of danger robs us of what we value.

Two decades ago, when I started writing what would be The Marginalianit was just a touch of comfort. (In some important ways, it still is.) Struggling materially and spiritually to make a new life in a new world, not yet twelve and suffering from a far from pleasant childhood, I found myself longing for reassurance from those who had lived it. with despair before – all the millennia of those who loved and lost and sang and mourned, this common record of strength, this open palm of kindness against those who did not feel the fist of truth.

This is also what Michael Ignatieff is looking for On Consolation: Finding Comfort in Dark Times (public library) – his search for that eternal way of life of assurance during two thousand years of life, from those who write openly about the problem of life to those who try to solve it with their lives and their art, from Montaigne and Camus to Gustav Mahler and Anna Akhmatova.

Art by Valerio Vidali from Shadow Elephant by Nadine Robert – a soft modern fairy tale about what it takes to make our grief green

Usually, we understand what something is like by touching its boundaries. When he visits an old friend who has recently lost his wife, Ignatieff finds him “truly inconsolable,” his grief is so great and unspeakable that language between them remains silent, his friend's pain “is a profound loneliness that cannot be met.” He shows:

To understand comfort, it is important to start at times when it is impossible.

But then there is something in us – a certain survival, a stubborn rebellion of the soul – going forward, insisting on the possibility, the obligation to live. Defining consolation as “an argument about why life is the way it is and why we should go on,” Ignatieff wrote:

The console. It comes from Latin the consolorfinding comfort together. Comfort is what we do, or try to do, when we share each other's suffering or want to bear our own. What we want is how we can continue, how we can continue, how we can restore the belief that life is worth living.

For thousands of years, that belief was the domain of religion, with its promises of salvation in another world to return our suffering to this one. But because belief, unlike truth, is not something that reality testing can provide binary confirmation or falsification of, there are many paths of truth to the same belief. To find comfort “we do not need to believe in God,” writes Ignatieff, “but we need faith in people and the chain of meanings we have inherited.” Tracing that chain from the Roman Stoics (“who promised that life would be less painful if we could learn how to renounce the vanity of human desires”) to Montaigne and Hume (“who asked if we would ever see the greater meaning of our suffering”) to us, he contrasts the comfort of philosophy with that of religion to provide a foundation in the quicksand of extinction hope:

These thinkers also expressed the fervent belief that religion has missed the most important source of comfort for all human beings. The purpose of life was not to be found in the promise of paradise, or in the control of passions, but in daily life to the fullest. To be comforted, simply put, was to hold on to one's love of life as it is, here and now.

Discus Chronologicus – German illustration of the period from the early 1720s, included Cartographies of Time. (Available as a print and as a wall clock.)

Paradoxically, the main challenge of comfort is how to live in the here and now without being distracted by the endless gift. There is great loneliness in our private suffering and especially loneliness in time, because suffering makes us castaways on the present island, so barren and friendless that we stop being able to see the horizon at that time. That is why when it feels impossible to look forward, it is wise to look back – in the past that the present future is a living testimony, for people who also feel that their suffering cannot be saved but they continue to live anyway. Ignatieff writes:

To see ourselves in harmony with history is to restore our connection with the comfort of our ancestors and to find our relationship with their knowledge… Comfort is an act of solidarity in space — to be in a relationship with the bereaved, to help a friend in a difficult time. ; but it is also an act of solidarity over time — we reach back to the dead and find meaning in the words they left behind… These works help us find words for something that has no words, an experience of isolation that binds us to silence.

Because comfort is a sign of resignation, which is a form of doubt about possibility, and because hope is the antipode of criticism, comfort and hope are inseparable:

An important element of comfort is hope: the belief that we can recover from loss, defeat and disappointment, and that the time left to us, no matter how short, gives us first chances and, we fail perhaps, but as Beckett said, he fails. better. It is this hope that allows us, even in the face of tragedy, to remain steadfast.

[…]

There is some irreparable loss; some experiences from which we may not fully recover; some scars that heal but do not fade. The challenge of comfort in our times is to endure sorrow, even when we do not find its meaning, and continue to live in hope.

The card that appears Bird Almanac: 100 Fortune Telling Uncertain Daysalso available as a stand-alone text and as notecards.

However, Ignatieff concludes that, no matter how much confirmation we can get from those who lived before us, in the end – as we all eventually find out – “each of us must create a purpose for ourselves and hope to support it.” He writes this creative act of the spirit:

Comfort is a conscious process where we seek an explanation for our loss and at the same time it is a deep unconscious activity, deep in our souls, where we find hope. It is the hardest but also the most rewarding work we do, and we cannot escape it. We cannot live in hope without counting death, or loss and failure.

[…]

In the next stages of recovery, you start feeling sorry for yourself, until it becomes clear that there are worse things in life. In the next phase, you tell yourself that you gave it your best, even though it always hurts to admit that your best wasn't good enough. Then try to let it all go, and find that there isn't a day where you don't wish you weren't smart and delusional. But at the end of this journey, you finally understand … that you have to take ownership of the whole person you once were, be proud of what you tried to do, and take responsibility only for those parts of your failure that were yours alone. . In this slow, circuitous, unconscious way, you find comfort.

Comfort, of course, does not always last, it needs to be strengthened and rethought if it will finally support and anchor us, because in each of us there is a pendulum that keeps swinging between hope and despair. Deep comfort is found when we stop identifying with the pendulum and remember that we are time itself, in the hands of which there is no permanent state and no sense of finality.

The card that appears Bird Almanac: 100 Fortune Telling Uncertain Daysalso available as a stand-alone text and as notecards.

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