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Tag Archives: grief

I Am a Strange Loop

19 Saturday Sep 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Biography, Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on I Am a Strange Loop

Tags

Carol Hofstadter, David Brooks, Douglas Hofstadter, grief, I Am a Strange Loop, loss, marriage, mourning, The Road to Character

Carol and Douglas Hofstader

“In the month of December, 1993, when we were just a quarter of the way into my sabbatical year in Trento, Italy, my wife Carol died very suddenly, essentially without warning, of a brain tumor. She was not yet 43, and our children, Danny and Monica, were but five and two. I was shattered in a way I could never have possibly imagined before our marriage. There had been a bright shining soul behind those eyes, and that soul had been suddenly eclipsed. The light had gone out.

What hit me by far the hardest was not my own personal loss (‘Oh, what shall I do now? Who will I turn to in moments of need? Who will I cuddle up beside at night?’) — it was Carol’s personal loss. Of course I missed her, I missed her enormously — but what troubled me much more was that I could not get over what she had lost: the chance to watch her children grow up, see their personalities develop, savor their talents, comfort them in their sad times, read them bedtime stories, sing them songs, smile at their childish jokes, paint their rooms, pencil in their heights on their closet walls, teach them to ride a bike, travel with them to other lands, expose them to other languages, get them a pet dog, meet their friends, take them skiing and skating, watch old videos together in our playroom, and on and on. All this future, once so easily taken for granted, Carol had lost in a flash, and I couldn’t deal with it.

There was a time, many months later, back in the United States, when I tried out therapy sessions for recently bereaved spouses — ‘Healing Hearts’, I think they were called — and I saw that most of the people whose mates had died were focused on their own pain, on their own loss, on what they themselves were going to do now. That, of course, was the meaning of the sessions’ name — you were supposed to heal, to get better. But how was Carol going to heal?

I truly felt as if the other people in these sessions and I were talking past each other. We didn’t have similar concerns at all! I was the only one whose mate had died when the children were tiny, and this fact seemed to make all the difference. Everything had been ripped away from Carol, and I could not stand thinking about — but I could not stop thinking about — what she’d been cheated out of. This bitter injustice to Carol was the overwhelming feeling I felt, and my friends kept on saying to me (oddly enough, in a well-meaning attempt to comfort me), ‘You can’t feel sorry for her! She’s dead! There’s no one to feel sorry for any more!’ How utterly, totally wrong this felt to me.

One day, as I gazed at a photograph of Carol taken a couple of months before her death, I looked at her face and I looked so deeply that I felt I was behind her eyes, and all at once, I found myself saying, as tears flowed, ‘That’s me! That’s me!’ And those simple words brought back many thoughts that I had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher-level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopes were not separate or distinct hopes but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us together into a unit, the kind of unit I had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. I realized then that although Carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but that it lived on very determinedly in my brain.”

__________

The most moving section of Douglas R. Hofstadter’s endlessly layered and enigmatic book about the nature of self, I Am a Strange Loop.

I should mention that I first heard of Hofstadter’s work from David Brooks, who has cited this passage in several of his columns since first quoting it in “A Partnership of Minds” in July 2007. These remarks command a full page in his newest book The Road to Character.

Read on:

  • James Fenton hits this exact note in his poem “For Andrew Wood”
  • A relevant reflection from Edmond de Goncourt’s journals
  • Sehnsucht

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“Immortality Ode” by William Wordsworth

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ Comments Off on “Immortality Ode” by William Wordsworth

Tags

grief, loss, memory, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, Poem, poetry, William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O ye Fountains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquish’d one delight
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Even more than when I tripp’d lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born Day
Is lovely yet;
The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o’er man’s mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

__________

From the last two sections of William Wordsworth’s 1802 poem “Immortality Ode.” The full work (which is often tellingly called the “Great Ode”) deserves a slow read. You’ll find it in the Penguin edition of Wordsworth’s Selected Poems.

There’s more:

  • “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent” by John Milton
  • “Neutral Tones” by Thomas Hardy
  • “Holy Island” by Andrew Motion

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How the Greeks Grieved

11 Sunday Jan 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature, War

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Antilochus, Atreus, casualties, combat, Greek History, grief, Helen, Homer, Ithaca, Memnon, Menelaus, Nestor, Odysseus, Stanley Lombardo, Telemachus, The Odyssey, War

Greek Bust

Menelaus, the head of the table, overheard
And, speaking to both of them, had this to say…

“I would gladly live with a third of my wealth
To have those friends back who perished
Far from the bluegrass pastures of home. And yet,
Though I weep for each of them often in my halls,
Easing my heart, I do not grieve constantly —
A man can get too much of chill grief.
I miss them all, but there is one man I miss
More than all the others. When I think of him
I don’t want to sleep or eat, for no one
In the entire Greek army worked as hard
As Odysseus, and all he ever got for it
Was pain and sorrow, and I cannot forget
My sorrow for him. He has been gone so long,
And we do not know whether he is alive or dead…

I used to think that if he came back
I would give him a welcome no other Greek
Could ever hope to have — if heaven
Had brought us both home from over the sea
In our swift ships. I would have given him
A city of his own in Argos, built him a house,
Brought him over from Ithaca with his goods,
His son and all of his people — a whole city
Cleared out just for him! We would have been together,
Enjoying each other’s company, and nothing
Would have parted us until death’s black cloud
Finally enfolded us. But I suppose fate itself
Begrudged us this, for Odysseus alone,
That unlucky man, was never brought home.”

His words aroused in all of them
A longing for lamentation. Argive Helen,
A child of nobles, wept; Telemachus wept;
And Menelaus wept, the son of Atreus.
Nor could Nestor’s son keep his eyes dry,
For he remembered Antilochus,
His flawless brother, who had been killed
By Memnon, Dawn’s resplendent son,
And this memory gave wings to his words:

“Son of Atreus, old Nestor used to say,
Whenever we talked about things like this,
That no one could match your understanding.
So please understand me when I say
That I do not enjoy weeping after supper—
And it will be dawn before we know it.
Not that I think it’s wrong to lament the dead.
This is all we can do — cut our hair
And shed some tears. I lost someone myself
At Troy, my brother, not the least hero there.
You probably knew him. I am too young
Ever to have seen him, but men say Antilochus
Could run and fight as well as any man alive.”

And Menalaus, the king:

“No one could have put that better, my friend,
Not even someone much older. Your speech,
wise and clear, shows the sort of father you have.
It’s easy to spot a man for whom heaven
Has spun out happiness in marriage and children,
As he has done for Nestor throughout his life.
And now he has reached a sleek old age in his halls
And his children are good and fight with the best
So we will stop this weeping, and once more
Think of supper.

__________

From Book IV of Homer’s Odyssey.

More from Homer:

  • The Odyssey’s opening lines and the journey home
  • Homer’s lyric description of Odysseus falling sleep
  • When the wealthy fought on the front lines

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Mr. Jefferson, Would You Live Your Life over Again?

20 Saturday Dec 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Mr. Jefferson, Would You Live Your Life over Again?

Tags

grief, hope, John Adams, letter, Optimism, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson engraving after painting by Rembrandt Peale.

“You ask if I would agree to live my 70, or rather 73, years over again? To which I say Yea. I think with you that it is a good world on the whole, that it has been framed on a principle of benevolence, and more pleasure than pain dealt out to us.

There are indeed (who might say Nay) gloomy and hypochondriac minds, inhabitants of diseased bodies, disgusted with the present, and despairing of the future; always counting that the worst will happen, because it may happen. To these I say: How much pain have cost us the evils which have never happened?

My temperament is sanguine. I steer my bark with hope in the head, leaving fear astern. My hopes indeed sometimes fail; but not oftener than the forebodings of the gloomy. There are, I acknowledge, even in the happiest life, some terrible convulsions, heavy set-offs against the opposite page of the account. I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended. All our other passions, within proper bounds, have a useful object… I wish the pathologists then would tell us what is the use of grief in the economy, and of what good it is the cause, proximate or remote.”

__________

Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to John Adams on April 8th, 1816, which you’ll find along with other gems in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence.

More:

  • Meet Thomas Jefferson
  • David Brooks and Jon Meacham discuss Jefferson, Hamilton, and the art of politics
  • Jefferson and Hamilton duke it out over the national debt

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Jefferson on Taking Life as It Comes

05 Sunday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Comments Off on Jefferson on Taking Life as It Comes

Tags

fate, General Philosophy, grief, Jefferson, John Page, letter, Life, Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson “The most fortunate of us, in our journey through life, frequently meet with calamities and misfortunes which may greatly afflict us; and, to fortify our minds against the attacks of these calamities and misfortunes, should be one of the principal studies and endeavours of our lives. The only method of doing this is to assume a perfect resignation to the Divine will, to consider that whatever does happen, must happen; and that by our uneasiness, we cannot prevent the blow before it does fall, but we may add to its force after it has fallen.

These considerations, and others such as these, may enable us in some measure to surmount the difficulties thrown in our way; to bear up with a tolerable degree of patience under this burthen of life; and to proceed with a pious and unshaken resignation, till we arrive at our journey’s end, when we may deliver up our trust into the hands of him who gave it, and receive such reward as to him shall seem proportioned to our merit. Such, dear Page, will be the language of the man who considers his situation in this life, and such should be the language of every man who would wish to render that situation as easy as the nature of it will admit. Few things will disturb him at all: nothing will disturb him much.”

__________

Thomas Jefferson, writing in a letter to his friend John Page on July 15th, 1763.

Jefferson would’ve been twenty when he jotted this down.

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‘The Mystery of Suffering’: Robert Kennedy and the Meaning of Grief

24 Sunday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Aeschylus, Agnosticism, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, birth, Catholic, Catholicism, Charles Spalding, Christianity, Department of Justice, despair, Edith Hamilton, Euripides, existentialism, fate, God, Government, Greek philosophy, Greek tragedy, grief, history, Jackie Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, Nat Fein, Oedipus Tyrannus, Paul Mellon, President, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, Sophocles, The Greek Way, tragedy

Robert F. Kennedy Looking at John F. Kennedy Walk Away by Nat Fein

“Over Easter in 1964 [Robert] went with Jacqueline, her sister and brother-in-law, the Radziwills, and Charles Spalding to Paul Mellon’s house in Antigua. Jacqueline, who had been seeking her own consolation, showed him Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way. ‘I’d read it quite a lot before and I brought it with me. So I gave it to him and I remember he’d disappear. He’d be in his room an awful lot of the time… reading that and underlining things.’…

Robert Kennedy’s underlinings suggest themes that spoke to his anguish. He understood with Aeschylus ‘the antagonism at the heart of the world,’ mankind fast bound to calamity, life a perilous adventure; but then ‘men are not made for safe havens. The fullness of life is in the hazards of life…’ This was not swashbuckling defiance; rather it was the perception that the mystery of suffering underlay the knowledge of life… Robert Kennedy memorized the great lines from the Agamemnon of Aeschylus: ‘He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.’…

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy. He underscored a line from Herodotus: ‘Brief as life is there never yet was or will be a man who does not wish more than once to die rather than to live.’ In later years, at the end of an evening, he would sometimes quote the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles:

The long days store up many things nearer to grief than joy
… Death at the last, the deliverer.
Not to be born is past all prizing best.
Next best by far when one has seen the light.
Is to go thither swiftly whence he came.

The fact that he found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.'”

Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy

__________

Again from Arthur Schlesinger’s great (if hagiographic) biography Robert Kennedy and His Times.

About the top picture: It is not an image of Robert and John together, with John walking away from his brother across the dunes. Rather, this photograph was taken in 1966. Robert was touring a photo gallery, when he came across this Mark Evans mural of his brother. While he had casually strolled past the other works, he stopped for several seconds before this one, not saying a word, then continued walking. The resulting photograph of the event was taken by Nat Fein.

I’ve written out some meandering reflections on the references and broader implications to be found in this section of Schlesinger’s book, but I’m going to publish them later this week, hopefully in combination with some other scattered thoughts about John F. Kennedy’s legacy and death.

Until then, read a section of Robert’s improvised eulogy for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he quotes the above passage from Aeschylus.

Aeschylus

Last Words for MLK

Or, read some additional wisdom from the Greeks:

Roman Face

From Homer’s Odyssey

Romans Statue

From the Discourses of Epictetus

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‘Tragedy without Reason?’: Robert Kennedy Endures His Brother’s Death

23 Saturday Nov 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Philosophy

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Agnosticism, American Government, American Politics, Arthur Schlesinger, Christianity, Department of Justice, despair, existentialism, fate, God, Government, grief, history, Jackie Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, JFK, John F. Kennedy, Kennedys, President, Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and His Times, tragedy

President Kennedy gallery

“Tragedy without reason? But was there anything in the universe without reason? The question echoed: ‘Why, God?’ For an agnostic the murder of John Kennedy seemed one more expression of the ultimate fortuity of things. But for those who believed in a universe infused by the Almighty with pattern and purpose—as the Kennedys did—Dallas brought on a philosophical as well as an emotional crisis. Robert Kennedy in particular had to come to terms with his brother’s death before he could truly resume his own existence.

In these dark weeks and months, on solitary walks across wintry fields, in long reverie at his desk in the Department of Justice, in the late afternoon before the fire in Jacqueline Kennedy’s Georgetown drawing room, in his reading—now more intense than ever before, as if each next page might contain the essential clue—he was struggling with that fundamental perplexity: whether there was, after all, any sense to the universe. His faith had taught him there was. His experience now raised the searching and terrible doubt. If it were a universe of pattern, what divine purpose had the murder of a beloved brother served? An old Irish ballad haunted him.

Sheep without a shepherd;
When the snow shuts out the sky—
Oh, why did you leave us, Owen?
Why did you die?

He scrawled on a yellow sheet:

The innocent suffer—how can that be possible and God be just.

and

All things are to be examined & called into question—
There are no limits set to thought.”

Robert Kennedy, Jacqueline Kennedy, and Ted Kennedy at the Funeral for John F. Kennedy

__________

From chapter 26 (“Corridors of Grief”) of Robert Kennedy and His Times by Arthur Schlesinger.

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