In the history of Western literature, the characters that sadden us most are those we find suffering from and often debilitated by the meaninglessness of daily existence, characters so wracked with despair that death sometimes stands as a comforting horizon--and, in fact, the only horizon that will relieve them of the burden of choice and, thus, of the work of fabricating meaning from their choices. In Shakespeare, we have Hamlet, who wonders whether to “suffer / the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles”; there's Voltaire's Candide; Hardy gave us Jude, among others; Anna Karenina; Mrs. Dalloway; in Beckett, we find poor Krapp; Elliot conceived of Prufrock along with his Hollow Men; Camus' Mersault thankfully finds his end; any of Eugene O'Neil's plays would furnish good examples. To exhaust the list would be to fill a good-sized book.
The Prophet Jonah is the archetypal forerunner for such characterizations. Unlike his mythological predecessors, Sisyphus and Prometheus, and his scriptural counterpart, Job, --all three of whom are physically moored to certain limitations of choice--Jonah's despair derives from his own solipsistic deliberations. Indeed, throughout his story we find Jonah at pains to understand the consequences of choice and in constant flight from the burdens of them. When he is swallowed by the whale and then sits in its belly for three days and nights--an act that foreshadows the creation of characters such as Dostyevsky's Underground Man and John Barth's Jacob Horner--Jonah finds himself so steeped in the darkness of existence that he essentially has no choice but to imbue the canvas of his life with some semblance of meaning: “Those who cling to empty folly / Forsake their own welfare!” he proclaims to the Lord. “Spewed” from the whale's belly, fresh with a new look on life, Jonah then sojourns to Nineveh and tells its citizens that the wrath of the Lord will soon befall them, but only to have this portent, to his utter dismay, go unvanquished. Having borne witness to the emptiness of his words and the meaninglessness of his former proclamations, Jonah lapses into deep depression and flees to the desert.
To portray the capricious ways of the world is this tale's intention. But in the end we are left with nothing but sadness for this character who cannot make heads or tails of such things. Our sadness for Jonah deepens when we find him in the desert seemingly free of the burdens of choice; for the capricious choices of the natural world (a subject that provided Hardy with a lifetime of musings) serve, here, as the metaphorical correlate to the apparent emptiness of human choice and action. In the closing passages, when Jonah's lone ricinus plant gets eaten by a worm, God asks, “Are you so deeply grieved about the plant?” To which Jonah replies, “Yes, so deeply I want to die.” It is not, of course, the death of the plant that aggrieves Jonah; it's the meaninglessness of that death and, therefore, of life.
Characters like Jonah bestir sadness so effectively because their psychological struggles parallel, in albeit hyperbolic and condensed forms, our own lifelong struggles with meaning and existence. Kierkegaard called this struggle a “sickness of the self”:
[T]he torment of despair has more in common with the situation of a mortally ill person when he lies struggling with death and yet cannot die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death . . . . Such is the nature of despair, this sickness of the self, this sickness unto death. Death is not the end of sickness, but death is incessantly the end. To be saved from this sickness by death is an impossibility, because the sickness and its torment--and the death--are precisely this inability to die.
To be conscious of death, and therefore strapped with the work of making meaning of life, constitutes the eternal burden of being human. How can we resist staring at our palms and wondering, like Jonah: Why?
Our cognizance of time is what compounds (and perhaps even creates) this despair, this sickness. Indeed, each part of time's familiar trinity--past, present, future--contains the curtains to its own tragic stage: before us stands the past, a mnemonic representation of our percolations through life, a theater of choices whose acts we incessantly replay and whose scenes incessantly sadden (regret, despair, call it what you will; either way, they sadden); to allay this sadness, we turn toward the future, a theater that holds a seemingly unblemishable dialogue between hope and fortune; but the past can't help but to qualify and thus limit the future, and soon we realize that its potential merely serves as a pathway into the world of choice--choices that eventually trickle into the past and furnish us with tomes of decisions that, when revisited, suffer from (what were) our high expectations. Beyond that, of course, there's the inevitable act: time's eventual surcease.
Perhaps, then, the present serves as our one possible stronghold for meaningful fulfillment.
Locked in it, however, strapped to the presage of successive moments, we become, like Rilke's Nikolai Kuzmich, the sad witnesses of time's perpetual passing:
As he was sitting there with wide open eyes in his dark room, he began to understand that what he felt now was time itself as it passed by. He literally recognized them, all these tiny seconds, one as tepid as the other, but fast, but fast. Heaven knows where they were rushing. That this had to happen to him of all people, when he considered any kind of wind a personal insult. Now he would be sitting there, and the draft would continue, his whole life long.
Tick-tock, tick-tock.
In one of his many uplifting poems, Philip Larkin asks, “Where can we live but days?”--a question that accentuates our ontological ignorance rather than relieves us of it. But so often our days are best when we find ourselves wrapped in the adversity of other characters' days. That is, when we sit curled up on the couch reading of misfortune rather than experiencing it ourselves. And so our tears, the lumps in our throats arise seemingly divested of any association to our own misery. These characters comfort as they sadden. We consume their despair because that consumption allows us some respite from our own; our sadness for them serves as the temporary surrogate for our own sad lives.
Our books block the clocks on the walls.
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