There is a Crack in Things

It is pleasant, when on the vast sea the winds are stirring up the water, to look at the great misfortune of another person from the land; not because it is pleasant to rejoice in another man’s troubles, but because it is a relief to comprehend what types of evils from which you yourself have been spared.

- Lucretius, De Rerum Natura 2.1-19:

It is useful to remind oneself on occasion that the world is not as it ought to be, that there is, as Leonard Cohen puts it, an eternal “crack in things.” I am aware of the good fortune presupposed by the previous sentence — only one to which the world has been rather kind needs to remind himself that ours is a fallen world, for there are many that bear on their backs the weight of it all. Though I have worked quite hard to build a life that I enjoy, the gods giveth, and the gods taketh away: it is not hard work that gifted to me a little girl who wears the sun on her head, who holds the world in her eyes, nor was it toil that brought to me her mother; and if I have worked hard for my bread, the work could just as well have gone unnoticed by anyone but the few good souls that walked the same patch of earth with me at the beginning of it all; it could have been that, under the weight of that work, I fell to the same internal cave-dwellers that enveloped and killed my father rather than having the corrective instinct to instead avoid atrophic routines, wake up early, exercise, and find joy in explorations of our strange situation between Heaven and Hell.

For every individual the world maintains constant potential for the darkest kind of darkness — a sticky, bilious black from which it is difficult, often impossible, to reemerge. The reminder is useful, I say, so that not only one might appreciate the light but by will and effort situate himself so as best to bask in it for as long as it might shine down. In other words, light is best taken in against a backdrop of the darkness that well could be. The tragic dramas of the Greeks, the black books of Schopenhauer, and the English bard that twists one’s guts will do, but one must approach these as ice baths — quickly in, and so out, lest he freeze.