On Sadness
(Random Thoughts)
Ecclesiastes: "Many indeed have killed sadness, and there is no use in it."
The Book of Proverbs: "Like a moth in clothing or a worm in wood, sorrow gnaws at the human heart. "
In The Old Testament, as in many of the foundational texts of religions, lies an explanation of the origin of sadness: we have been driven out of Paradise, and we have lost it; we have lost the immortal, divine condition of happy beings. We are sad and mortal; we are sad because we are mortal, sad because we can kill our fellow man, our brothers. We are orphans of Heaven; sadness is the human condition we must fight against all our life.
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Definitions of Sadness.
The Devoto-Oli dictionary tells: "State of depression attributable to a particular pain or widespread gloom and melancholy."
More specifically, Webster says, "Grief or unhappiness."
The Etymological Dictionary of the Italian Language informs us that a sad someone (or something) "... expresses affliction, is devoid of joy, serenity, pleasure, and the like".
Is there any worse threat to being alive?
"Sad" is also a reviled term. "Sad" was said of a bad person. "Sad" is synonymous with unfortunate, wretched, wicked, and evil. As it was, in Latin, "tristis". It's almost as if sadness, in its abuse, in its complacency, and in its extreme, could transform its victim into a dangerous aggressor.
Too many sadnesses await us at the crossroads of our lives.
Sadness Over the Loss of Unknown Happiness.
Sadness originates from the nostalgia of an imaginary time and place we believe lost that no real time and no real place can give us back. At that specific time and in that imaginary place, we came to know absolute beauty, peace, and joy without danger, threats, rancor, sickness, or death, and without end. We were in paradise, far away in space and time. A dream place. Just like the idyllic places religions tell us we were kicked out of. And, so, we are forever dwelling on the sin that caused this loss, lingering on our terrible sin and guilt we must atone for.
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Sadness Over the Loss of Known Happiness.
In the reality of our lives, we look, overwhelmed by regret, at the time that was and is no more and at the places of remembrance. Ours is a constant mourning.
We must not return to where we have already been; the Romani people and Travelers know this. We risk grief by seeing what we have known again because we have changed, others have changed, and places have changed. It is no longer the same color. It is no longer that life that was also ours. Yet, our chit-chat always revolves around the time and places of the past, and we spend minutes indulging in the contemplation of old photographs. We finally close the photo album to be reunited with the sadness known as nostalgia.
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Sadness Over the Age of Innocence.
"Today I am so sad and desolate, but when I was a child - how happy I was when I was a child!" When sadness overcomes them, many people seek consolation in the lost days of childhood, a golden age which they store, locked up in their safe of memories.
For other people, the age of innocence is the source of their incurable sadness. Deeply unhappy are those who still live with childhood pain. They have been deprived of something precious that nothing and no one can ever return to them. They grow old remaining children because the seed of their suffering lies in their childhood, and they spend the rest of their lives trying to heal the pain.
"Man is born in labor:
and there's a risk of death in being born.
The very first things he learns
are pain and anguish: from the first
his mother and father
console him for being born..."
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Sadness Over Abandonment.
Anna Freud tells us about one of her patients: "A girl passionate about mountaineering one day was taking a long walk in the Alps. Stopping to rest near a waterfall, she forgot her cap where she had momentarily lingered. This loss was in itself insignificant and, at first, did not seem to bother her that much. Her mood changed the night after the excursion. As she lay in her bed, unable to sleep, she was suddenly forced to think of her lost, abandoned cap, forgotten in the dark solitude of the mountain landscape. The desolation of this image became so extreme and intolerable that she fell asleep sobbing".
We are also our lost objects. Whether abandoned, or rejected. Their sadness is our sadness. The sadness of still lifes.
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Sadness, the Mother of Poetry and Literature.
Sadness pushes an author's lonely steps towards the blank page, reshuffles his known and unknown sorrows, and forces him to travel in the darkness in search of often painful and difficult truths.
In a short story by Karen Blixen, God feels sorry for a young writer unhappy with his work, and for this, he gives the writer a gift: "I will give you those sorrows you need to write your books..."
Ovid calls his collection of poems from the exile, 'Sadnesses' (Tristia): "... that I have stained with tears." But he has the strength to rebel: "Here I am deprived of the homeland and of you and of the house, robbed of everything they could take of me, yet my creativity still keeps me company, and I use it..."
Yes, the creative act is medicine to cure torment. Poe, in The Poetic Principle, suggests that sadness can be cured by poetry and that, by processing sadness, poetry reveals its component of pleasure.
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Sadness in Painting.
A poster of a modern painting, The Scream: the sky at sunset is rippled with a blood-like red over the blue and black water of the river; on a bridge, a twisted figure – a man? A woman? or a child? – holds his empty face and screams out to us his despair. A silent scream, and for this, even more deafening.
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Sadness Over Love.
Many relationships are built on a misunderstanding: the illusion of being loved for who you are when, instead, the image you embody for the other is the true object of desire.
It's a misunderstanding that causes heartbreaking disappointments...
Polonius, speaking of Hamlet:
"And he, repulsèd – a short tale to make –
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
into the madness wherein now he raves,
And all we wail for."
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Sadness of the Psyche.
A psychotic patient says, "Why do you describe hell with fire? In hell, you are frozen in your lonely emptiness, in total sadness, in the block of ice where your voice can't get out."
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PCT
This is a multipurpose acronym. For Italians, it can mean Processo Civile Telematico (Telematic Civil Process) or the lab exam for the hematocrit of blood platelets. Or, instead, it can mean the Patent Cooperation Treaty. But it also has the lesser-known meaning of Post-Coital Tristesse. The sadness after coitus. I report, from Wikipedia in English: "Post-Coital Tristesse, also known as post-coital dysphoria (PCD), and colloquially post-nut clarity, is the feeling of sadness, anxiety, agitation or aggression after orgasm in sexual intercourse or masturbation. Its name comes from Neo-Latin postcoitalis and French tristesse, literally "sadness". Many people with PCT may “exhibit strong feelings of anxiety lasting from five minutes to two hours after coitus."
Galeno says, "Every animal is sad after coitus, except the human female and the rooster."
Woman, like Mother Earth, is rich in life. The pleasure of giving and taking life is firm in her body and in her mind. Man, on the other hand, has spent his "life force" experiencing a "small death," as the orgasm is sometimes called, but it is also a moment of happiness in the body and then mental oblivion. As soon as the orgasm is over, bliss and oblivion fade away, and the man finds himself in a kind of temporary mourning, temporarily without any more strength or joy, powerless in both body and soul. Research says that women might feel Post-Coital Tristesse, too, but to a much lesser extent.
The cock (as in rooster), the stupid male par excellence, only knows how to please himself and does not experience PCT.
Spinoza, in his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, searching for true happiness and the sense of good, questions why, after sexual pleasure, one is pulled into a divine state, once the enjoyment is dead, the mind plunges "into the greatest sadness."
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The Sadness of History.
No novel, painting, or film can truly represent what man can do to the flesh of their fellow man. It cannot be expressed. This observation concerning the human race from the dawn of history until this very afternoon is atrocious and cannot fail to throw us into the most profound discomfort and the most painful sadness.
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Medieval sadness.
In the magical Middle Ages, escape from the sadness of the world in search of pure happiness produced an extraordinary collection of stories. A multitude of imaginative men journeyed into the unknown, traversing lands, seas, and rivers, facing a thousand dangers. These men were willing to walk for their entire lives to reach the exact point where the Earth touches Heaven so they could finally enter that unknown Paradise. And know it.
The Celtic Oisin, in his long roaming, met only a girl whom he loved. The Irish knight Owen reached a place dictated in his atonement and, by passing through it, returned without remembering anything anymore. Harald, Prince of Norway, ended up in an immense abyss, and Gorm, King of Denmark, who left with his trusty Torkillo, ended up massacred. Nothing is known of Merlin, who sailed away on a crystal ship in search of blessed islands. Saint Brendan departed in 561, sailing on a small craft into the ocean. He alighted on many islands, one with a population of giant white sheep. One, however, was not an island but a giant, seemingly never-ending fish named Jasconius. When the fish felt the heat of the fire that Saint Brendan had lit on its back, it began to move, and he, realizing it was not an island, quickly fled. The holy man also happened upon an island where there were talking birds, who were perhaps angels, and then still other islands populated by beastly people until he finally reached a sea so calm that the water had almost coagulated. His voyage lasted seven years. He escaped stormy winds, sea monsters, birds, and blacksmiths hurling red-hot irons. He even met Judas, sitting on a rock in the middle of the ocean. He finally reached an island of light, the lucky island. He alighted on that land full of hope, but a river ran through it. He could not get beyond the river. He could not pass; it was uncrossable: right there, on the other side of the river, lay the Promised Land. It was Paradise Lost, and not even Saint Brendan could reclaim it. The Welsh Saint Malo made two trips with the giant Maclovius, to find the happy island, but it was in vain. Ogier the Dane wanted to conquer the earthly paradise with an army of twenty thousand men, but they got lost and were never heard from again. Huon d'Auvergne, accompanied by some griffins, found himself facing a dark cloud like a wall that could not be destroyed or crossed. A thousand others departed: Wretched Guerrin, Eirek, son of Thrand, Baldwin of Seburg with his friend Poliban, Saint Amarus, and many more embarked on long and perilous journeys. No one reached Happy Island. No one can defeat sadness.
American Sadness.
In the last pages of his autobiographical novel Martin Eden, Jack London describes the protagonist's devastating sadness that leads him to suicide, an extraordinary suicide, literally speaking. Yet Martin Eden was a man full of life and strength with a titanic will to succeed against all odds in transforming himself from a lowly illiterate sailor to a rich and famous poet and writer.
There are two reasons for his despair, one quite individual and one social. First, his happiness was all about the struggle; it lay in the conquest and desire. Once his goal had been reached and his desire satisfied, a sense of useless fullness (or an unfillable emptiness) assailed him, tearing him apart. Second, all those who had driven him out before, mocked, and despised him, including the aristocratic woman he loved, were now at his feet. Yet perhaps he had been better off before, dressed in rags, than now, in a shiny tuxedo. Overwhelmed by this bitter truth, Martin sunk into a relentless sadness: after surviving one last storm tied to the helm of his boat, he dove into the ocean and swam down towards the abyss... "And somewhere at the bottom, he fell into darkness. That much he knew. He had fallen into darkness. And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know."
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The Sadness of Our Time.
Straddling astounding technological progress, we look upon moral and political failures, the desolation of wars and genocides, the suffering of uprooting and migration, and the desolation of the outer boroughs. What are we to do? Our ancestors had the courage of imagination and embarked in search of happy islands... Will we -our children, I mean, and our children's children- find these happy places in the infinite expanse of space?