Distressing as this week’s news may be for many of us, it seems best to face it with a balanced outlook
By Herbert Rothschild
Each week, Tuesday is my deadline to submit my column. So, I’m writing this one before any election returns have come in. Its content is dictated by my need to prepare myself for the dreadful possibility that we’ll have to endure another four years of a Trump presidency. Given my cast of mind, however, what follows may be of interest even if today’s results realize our fervent hope that we won’t.
In Shakespeare’s time, the distinction between comedy and tragedy was crude but simple: Comedies ended in marriage, tragedies ended in death. Implied in the different endings is a distinction larger than delight and dole. While the tragic focus is on the single lives of the characters in a present action, the comic focus expands to include life beyond the time and place of the action, and characters lose something of their singularity.
Such expansion is implicit in the marriages, which were expected to produce the next generation. That implication often was made explicit in the plays. For instance, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” when the faeries invade the palace after the three couples retire at the end of their marriage celebration, their blessings of the marriage beds emphasize the birth of healthy issue. The promise of a succeeding generation extends the dynamic of most comic plots, which feature the triumph of young lovers over the obstacles the preceding generation puts in their way.
The more we attend to the present, the more intensely we’re affected by its particulars. Thanks to almost instantaneous global communications, each day the sufferings of our sisters and brothers in dozens of places near and far lay claim to our attention. It’s an emotional burden almost too heavy to bear.
One way to cope is to narrow our focus to what concerns us personally. For most of human history that’s all people could do. Others might be starving only 100 miles away and they wouldn’t know about it. What they knew was the availability to them of food, clothing and shelter, the adequacy of their own protection against the trespasses of others, the health of their own families and neighbors, the weather where they lived. Although such insularity is no longer a given, it remains a choice.
I don’t recommend it. It lightens the emotional burden of caring about others, but it also denies us the gratification of caring for them. Concomitant with the expansion of our ability to know what distant populations are enduring has been the expansion of our ability to help them endure.
As late as 1900 I think few people could have imagined that humankind would create a World Food Programme and a World Health Organization, that famine on one continent would be relieved with the surplus from another, that contagious diseases would be contained and, in some cases, completely eradicated by inoculating people in even the most remote areas. Such work is simply wonderful, and it not only depends on the individuals who do it, but also on the worldwide collectives that support it politically. People who focus only on their personal lives are unlikely to join those collectives. They’re more likely to display signs that say, “Get us out of the U.N.”
Then there’s the personal vulnerability of those who narrow their attention so they need not expand their concern. Forces they don’t understand will affect them in ways they don’t foresee. I sometimes try to imagine what ordinary Germans said to themselves as the bombs rained down on them in the closing months of World War II. Might some have said, “What did I do to deserve this?” You and I may say to ourselves that it won’t make much difference to us personally whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump is in the White House, but that’s not likely to be true.
There’s another way to cope with the well-nigh-unbearable burden of attending to the suffering of the world. Rather than narrowing our focus, we can expand it beyond the here and now. This expansion is how I earlier distinguished the comic from the tragic.
Fully comic perspectives acknowledge suffering. Indeed, that acknowledgement is often their starting point. They then regard suffering in ways that distance it emotionally. Gnostics deny the very existence of material reality and thus the pain of living in the flesh. Buddhists surrender all desire and thus the anxiety and loss it inevitably entails. A way less specific to any one tradition is to affirm the timeless unity of all existence without differentiations such as those between good and evil, and then align oneself with that timeless unity. From that vantage point, everything is as it should be, no matter what it is. That existential stance should sound familiar to those who read Inner Peace in Ashland.news.
There’s much to be said for the comic perspective understood as an unqualified affirmation of life. Yet, to blunt the cutting edge of suffering is to negate one pole of human experience that is just as meaningful as the other. Tennyson said it this way in his great elegy on the untimely death of his friend Arthur Hallam, “’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.”
I think it possible, and preferable, to affirm both the tragic and the comic sensibility. I never know what people mean when they talk about living life to the fullest. But if we don’t both hold tight and let go, grieve and give thanks, say no and say yes, I’m quite sure we haven’t.
When I read these thoughts again this Friday in Ashland.news, I hope they will inform equally my distress or my jubilation.
Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Opinions expressed in them represent the author’s views. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
