One more thought on the passing of Robin Williams, not Styrons words, but my own: I have seen more than a few posts by those who can’t accept or even understand the outpouring of sympathy for someone who was not only the victim of a selfless act but its perpetrator. I respect the sincerity of your conviction. I believe it proceeds from a kind of love that others may not see in your words, a love for those left behind in the aftermath of what is, fundamentally, a murder. I would call on that sincerity, on that love, and ask you to indulge me in a small experiment. I would ask you to take a moment or two to contemplate what you most sincerely love in this world. I would ask you to think of everything that gives your life meaning that is deep and profound. Some of you may be fortunate enough to include your work in such a consideration, especially if yours is less a vocation than a calling – I am thinking of the teachers and mentors and medical professionals and of those whose work is charity. Some of you may be fortunate enough to find yourselves considering a form of true self-expression – I am thinking of the writers and poets and painters and musicians. But move beyond such things. Hold them in your heart and go deeper. Consider the people you love most. Consider your friends. Consider your family – your parents, if they are with us, and your siblings. Consider your other, your partner, your spouse or your lover. And finally, when you are ready, consider your children. Now imagine contemplating those things that matter most to you, that give your life deep and profound meaning – imagine contemplating even your children – and realizing you can feel nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all. Imagine that no matter how you try, no matter the moment, even the sound of his laughter or the sight of her tears can move you not at all. Imagine feeling nothing, nothing at all, in the pursuit of what means most to you, in the expression of your innermost self, in the company of those you are meant to love, charged in a sacred way with loving. Imagine hearing your friend or parent or lover or child say, “I love you,” and hearing yourself say it back, and realizing to your horror and your shame that in the simplest sense – in the sense of felt experience – it isn’t true. Imagine realizing you can’t love, not really – not anything, not anyone - because you can’t feel. Imagine the way such a realization - lived day after day after day, cruelly unrelenting, an endless loop of recurring emptiness – imagine the way such a realization would throw the fundamental balance of the world into question. Think of the way in the deepest mourning, the memory of a loved one can still bring an instant of warmth before most go cold again, can make most smile if only for the briefest of moments. Now imagine even those instants and moments are beyond your grasp. Imagine the loss of everything that ever guided or moved you through a time of heartbreaking disappointment or crushing loss. Imagine believing none of it will return to you - no such instants, no such moments, no love, no connectedness, no integrity. Imagine the relentless monotony of a constant awareness of that most shamefully inhuman of failings, joined to so many ancillary guilts and regrets and cast in stark relief against an oppressive inability to feel any kind of comfort at all. Imagine looking even at your child and feeling nothing, day after day, until finally you can’t imagine ever feeling anything again, ever living a moment that isn’t excruciatingly empty. Could you live that way? A final thought, barely related but, I think, worth a moment: My father and his brother, my uncle and namesake, were Roman Catholic priests. They served in a time in which their Church regarded suicide as a mortal sin, one which brought certain damnation upon the deceased and made the very idea of honored burial a mockery, if not a blasphemy. Against all orthodoxy, my father and my uncle insisted on quietly burying those dead by their own hand as they would anyone else. They did it for the families, they said. And they did it, they said, because if a man jumps from a building, you can’t know if he repented on the way down.
Posted on: Tue, 12 Aug 2014 03:57:15 +0000
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