from Essays After Montaigne
No man is more free from this passion than I, for I neither love nor regard it: albeit the world hath undertaken, as it were upon covenant, to grace it with a particular favour. Therewith they adorne age, vertue, and conscience. Oh foolish and base ornament!
I am little subject to these violent passions. I have naturally a hard apprehension, which by discourse I daily harden more and more.
Nor am I given to violent passions, especially sadness. When my father died, I was frightened about what that meant for my own mortality, but I wasn't particularly sad about my loss or his unfulfilled potential. When the World Trade Center was destroyed, I (home in a Vicodin-induced haze after an appendectomy) wasn't sad or even afraid--I was peeved that the non-stop coverage pre-empted the telecast of Roma's Champions League game that afternoon. But I don't find my hardness of apprehension admirable. To my mind, there was something missing from my reactions.
So to become emotionally whole, to experience the full range of emotions to which people are subject, I undertook psycho-therapy. And I quickly found myself at swim in a lifetime's worth of difficult emotions without any prior practice. I tried various philosophic and meditative methods of extricating myself from the flood, but my feeble facility was insufficient. My therapist and psycho-pharmacologist, watching from the shore and fearing that I might drown, tossed in an anti-anxiety medication and an anti-depressant, and I am now learning to swim gradually.
That's one way to view my experience, but there are other ways. I've always felt isolated from others, fundamentally different from them in some ineffable way (though that turns out, ironically, to be a very common feeling). One of the ways I feel different is my lack of susceptibility to outsized emotions. All around me, the public throws its collective self headlong into paroxysms of grief over the premature deaths of various celebrities, ecstasies over the rescue of coal miners or the birth of septuplets, or knots of worry over potential strikes or storms, all while I stand aside and watch. I could feel superior, or I could recognize that as a defense against feeling left out. Did I undertake therapy to feel emotions and thereby fit in? And once in the process, did I resort to pharmaceuticals because I felt too much and had gone beyond the emotional range in which I might fit in? If so, my tale goes from being one of a valiant struggle to fulfill myself to being one of a sad struggle to conform.
Have my movements between the poles of hard apprehension and immersion in emotion reflected more general beliefs about emotion? It's easy enough to find examples of conspicuous consumption of sensational emotions pervading mainstream media. But it's just as easy to find examples of people recoiling from genuine expressions of significant emotion, of the medication of children against enthusiasm and adults against pain. A resolution to this apparent paradox is suggested by Terry Eagleton in his new book, Sweet Violence: The Idea of the Tragic:
The nature of tragedy has been argued over at least from the time of Aristotle's words on the subject in his fragmentary Poetics (late fourth century B.C.), a work that wielded great authority after its rediscovery in the late 15th century, though there had been much speculation even before that. Eagleton casts a satirical eye at many attempts, but at the root of his argument is the question of how "tragedy" came to be used in so many different ways, often of sad stories not necessarily associated with dramatic presentation, and also in common parlance, where it can apply to anything from a plane crash to a lost football game.
As Eagleton remarks, "the aesthetic and everyday senses of the word are constantly at loggerheads." The application of the term to anything in "real life" is held by some to be merely figurative, but Eagleton regards this "mandarin disdain" as an aspect of the perpetual war between classes. Ordinary folk are held incapable of the profundity of true tragedy; their disasters lack importance and beauty and are merely sad. He wants to end this snobbery and democratize tragedy. If it is in some way a good thing, it should be generally available. But why is it a good thing?
In the end Eagleton's explanation is religious. St. Paul says "we die every moment," so "we can disarm death by rehearsing it here and now in the self-bestowals of life."
This sounds right to me. Tragedy is a "good thing" because we crave abundant sadness, but at one remove, so that we can rehearse the dramatic moments that we'll get to experience only a very few times in our own lives. Why else would we be so fascinated by the last phone calls to loved ones from those trapped in the World Trade Center? Why else would reality television be so popular? We will seek out great emotion wherever we can find it, until it becomes personal and we seek protection from it.
3:16:26 PM 
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