How lovely and insufferable that solely considered one of every exists — every lover, every youngster, every canine; that this explicit chance-constellation of atoms has by no means earlier than existed and can by no means once more recur within the historical past of the universe. The very fact of every such singularity is a marvel past why, as mysterious and irrefutable as the explanation you’re keen on one and never one other. The sensation trembling beneath the actual fact — the brutal information that every part we love is irreplaceable but might be misplaced: to dissolution and dying, to rejection and indifference, to our personal return to stardust — is the toughest factor to bear, the factor for which we have now devised our most elaborate theaters of denial.
Amongst these coping mechanisms is the invention of sentimentality. “Sentimentality is a superstructure masking brutality,” Carl Jung wrote. Its unusual psychological equipment is what the poet Mark Doty explores with unusual perception and sensitivity in a passage from his fantastic memoir Dog Years (public library).
He writes:
The oversweetened floor of the sentimental exists to be able to shield its maker, in addition to the viewers, from anger. On the lovely picture refusing to carry, on the tenderness we convey to the objects of the world — our eagerness to like, make house, construct connection, belief the opposite — how all of that’s so readily swept away. Sentimental photographs of youngsters and of animals, sappy representations of affection — they’re fueled, in fact, by their opposites, by a horrible human rage that nothing stays. The greeting card verse, the airbrushed rainbow, the candy pet face on the fleecy pink sweatshirt — these photographs don’t honor the world as it’s, in its complexity and individuality, however distort issues in obvious service of a heat embrace. They really feel empty as a result of they won’t acknowledge the inherent anger that issues aren’t as proven; the world, of their phrases, isn’t a universe of people however a sequence of interchangeable situations of allure. It’s essential to claim the insignificance of individuality to make mortality bearable. On this approach, the sentimental represents a rage towards individuality, the singular, the irreplaceable. (Why don’t you simply get one other canine?) The anger that lies beneath the sentimental accounts for its bizarre hollowness. However it’s, I supposed, simpler to really feel than what lies beneath rage: the fear of vacancy, of waste, of the absence of which means or worth; the empty area of our personal dying, neither understandable nor representable.
After all, our fury at entropy is the good driving force of our creativity — we make artwork to make which means out of our mortality, to counteract its brutality with magnificence. Each inventive act is an act of comfort for our transience, for our despair about our transience. A century after Albert Camus insisted that “there is no love of life without despair of life,” Doty contemplates this basic equivalence of existence:
Despair, I believe, is the fruit of a refusal to simply accept our mortal scenario. Maybe it’s much less passive than it might appear; is despair a deep assertion of will? The cussed self saying, I cannot have it, I don’t settle for it. Wonderful, says the world, don’t settle for it. The collective continues; the entire goes on, whereas every half slips away. To connect, to connect passionately to the person, which is at all times doomed to fade — does that make one smart, or make one a idiot?
Complement with Annie Dillard on how to bear your mortality and D.H. Lawrence on the best lifelong preparation for death, then revisit Doty’s magnificent Whitman-lensed reflection on the courage to love despite the certitude of loss.
