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READINGS

[Essay] vocabulary just as we banish the unhappy, the


wounded, and the dying who challenge our preju-
THE ART OF dices, “break the mood.”
SUFFERING There is a terrible blindness in happiness. Just
as trash, in the consumerist universe, ends up in-
vading every space and reminding us of its exis-
By Pascal Bruckner, from Perpetual Euphoria: On tence in countless nauseating ways, so suffering,
the Duty to Be Happy, published by Princeton unable to express itself, has begun to proliferate,
University Press this month. Translated from the increasing our awareness of our vulnerability. The
French by Steven Rendall. West’s error, in the second half of the twentieth
century, was to give its people the mad hope that
an end would soon be put to all calamities; fam-

I n 1739 the young Comte de Mirabeau sent a


letter to his friend the Marquis de Vauvenargues,
ines, poverty, disease, and old age were supposed
to disappear within a decade or two, and a human-
ity cleansed of its immemorial ailments would
reproaching him for living from day to day with- appear at the gateway to the third millennium
out having any plan for achieving happiness: “See having proudly eliminated the last traces of hell.
here, my friend, you think all the time, you study, Europe was supposed to become, as Susan Sontag
and nothing is beyond the scope of your ideas; put it, the sole place where tragedies would no
and yet you never think for a moment about mak- longer occur.
ing a clear plan leading to what should be our Not only was this fairy tale not realized, but in
only goal: happiness.” He went on to list the prin- a certain way it strengthened what it was supposed
ciples that guided his own conduct: ridding him- to eliminate. People had rightly denounced the
self of prejudices, preferring gaiety to moodiness, culture of resignation propagated by churches and
following his inclinations and at the same time the bourgeoisie, especially in the nineteenth cen-
purifying them. Mirabeau, who was the child of a tury. At that time, effort and endurance were
time that thought it could reinvent the human considered normal, the price to be paid for sin or
being and do away with the plagues of the old re- poverty, and pleasure was considered a rarity, for-
gime, was concerned about his happiness the way bidden to the common people. But when hedonism
people before him had been concerned about the is established as a necessity, death and suffering
salvation of their souls. And yet have we changed become pure absurdities, intolerable assaults on our
that much? Since the Enlightenment, we have rights. Hence the paradox: our societies have nev-
been endlessly cataloguing misfortunes to be er talked so much about suffering as they have since
eradicated. Antiquity pinned its hopes on a refu- becoming exclusively concerned with happiness.
tation of suffering; Christianity pinned its hopes Democracy is ambivalent about suffering; be-
on suffering’s exaltation; we pin ours on its denial. cause it rejects suffering, suffering is made the basis
We have to simulate energy and good humor in of rights that are always being newly discovered.
the hope that if we conceal affliction it will finally Democracy’s great issues are first of all negative:
disappear by itself. We have banished it from our reducing poverty, putting an end to inequality,

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fighting disease. A contradiction inheres in the Thus we have arrived at a worrisome confusion
designation of the problems we are trying to do of adversity and unhappiness: the obstacle is no
away with: if all suffering gives someone a claim to longer the usual resistance that the world presents
a right and provides a foundation for the latter, to our enterprises but a personal offense that de-
physical and psychological pain gradually becomes serves compensation. We confound the painful and
the measure of all things. What was previously seen the unpleasant, the unfortunate and the arduous.
as a matter of course is now seen as unjust, arbitrary. Physical effort—except in its ludic form in sports—
Because the modest expectations typical of is banned; and hard labor and unpleasant tasks are
former times have given way to rising desires, we left to immigrants (an immigrant is someone who
live in a state of constant aspiration that is con- does not measure his effort). Intellectual effort, too,
stantly disappointed: no one is ever loved, grati- has been annexed to the domain of oppression, as
fied, or rewarded enough. The more immoderate in those schools that, seeking to respect children’s
the ambition, the more meager the result seems, sacrosanct freedom and spare them any vexation,
and the range of the intolerable never ceases to don’t attempt to transmit anything: learning is as-
grow. Democracy, generating a perpetual dissatis- similated to persecution.
faction, turns into a system for recognizing com- Misfortune is no longer clearly delimited; it has
plaints. It is through the legal profession, which invaded and conquered everything that is not
has become, in the words of one jurist, “an im- pleasure in the strict sense, swallowing up condi-
mense labor union against suffering,” that suffer- tions and emotions that were not previously as-
ing has returned to public discourse; outlawing it sociated with it. As a result, we have lost certain
ensures its continual renascence. Here the hunter senses of proportion. We enter into an intoxica-
is the prisoner of his quarry. tion with pathos, which is no longer a strategy of
distinction with respect to the bourgeois,
as it was for the Romantics, but a reflexive
lament, a philosophy of day-to-day despair.
The contemporary hell is not knowing
where pain begins or ends; pain takes
[Poem] all forms and extends to the very fact of
living, thus reviving a religious postulate
I DID THIS TO many had come to regard
MY VOCABULARY as quaint.

W e know the famous alternative with


which Voltaire confronts us in Candide:
By Michael Robbins, from the December issue of Poetry. human beings are born “to live in the
Robbins’s first book of poems, Alien vs. Predator, will be
published next year by Penguin. throes of anxiety or the lethargy of bore-
dom.” So our only choice would be be-
tween the horror of affliction and the mo-
notony of peace and quiet. A terrible
The moon is my alibi. My tenders throw hissy fits. dilemma! In reality, our appetite for life re-
My scalp’s at the foot of the precipice. quires adversities with which we can cope,
My lume is spento, there’s a creep in my cellar. that test our freedom without destroying
You can stand under my umbrella, Ella. it. We need obstacles that we can over-
come and that spare us the double experi-
Who put pubic hair on my headphones? ence of failure and insurmountable suffer-
Who put the ram in Ramallah? ing. Good things that are obtained
I’m just sitting here spinning my spinning wheels— without effort have no value (which is why
where are the snow tires of tomorrow? free merchandise attracts us less than it re-
pels us; even a thief pays a price when he
The llama is burning! My heart is an ovary! steals other people’s property). To the pu-
Let’s chase dawn’s tail across state lines, erile dream of a life in which the greatest
sing “Crimson and Clover” over and overy, goals would be achieved without effort, we
till wonders are taken for road signs. must reply that pleasure dies when the pi-
quancy of resistance evaporates and every-
My fish, fast and loose, shoot fish in a kettle. thing is attained immediately. Pain is a sal-
The boys like the girls who like heavy metal. utary wake-up call, a vital function that
On Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom, confronts us with our limits. Only things
on Motörhead, Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem . . . that repulse us teach us anything; our pro-
jects divide the world into a field of activi-
ties, and therefore into potential failures

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© THE ARTIST. COURTESY GLADSTONE GALLERY, NEW YORK CITY

Before Punk Came Funk, a mixed-media, ink, and paint collage on Mylar, by Wangechi Mutu, whose work was exhibited
in December at Gladstone Gallery, in New York City.

and successes. A life without combats, without a the French philosopher Bertrand Vergely. In oth-
burden, without effort of any kind, a life that is a er words, the only defeats that are beneficial are
straight line instead of Xenophon’s “steep slope,” the ones to which we can give meaning, that lead
would be a monument to languor. to broadening and leave us strengthened by an
But if people attain humanity only through experience that seemed likely to engulf us (never
ordeal, we still need to distinguish the latter from mind Nietzsche’s “Whatever doesn’t kill me neces-
penitence. Contrary to the idea that one must sarily makes me stronger”). What is interesting
have greatly suffered in order to know human be- about the biographies of common or famous peo-
ings (Elias Canetti is supposed to have told George ple, with their alternating rises, falls, and resurrec-
Steiner, “You will never write great books unless tions, is that they present ordinary individuals
someday you experience a complete mental col- capable of showing exceptional courage in desper-
lapse”), suffering does not teach people anything. ate situations, of finding a solution. The contem-
It makes them unhappy and bitter. “One has to porary hero is a circumstantial hero propelled
have very little love for humanity to think that it despite himself beyond the norms, an accidental
is by being shattered that a life progresses,” said fighter and not a professional brave. In the same

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way, sports fascinate us because they are played [Dossier]
against destiny: they emphasize the precariousness
of victory and of defeat. THE FOREVER WARD
Cicero noted that there are soldiers driven by
pride and passion who can endure countless suf- From cables sent by U.S. diplomats regarding the
ferings in combat but collapse when struck by an transfer of Guantánamo prisoners, among the
illness. We like constraints only when we impose 250,000 documents WikiLeaks began releasing last
them on ourselves and are prepared to expose November. Despite a 2009 executive order signed
ourselves to the worst dangers in order to achieve by President Barack Obama requiring that the de-
a superior goal. It is for each individual to set the tention center be shut down by January 22, 2010,
threshold of pain beyond which he refuses to go. 174 prisoners remain at Guantánamo.
(What would a life be worth that had never been
risked at least once, that had never experienced
the exhilarating proximity of death in order to Riina Kionka, High Representative Javier Sola-
defy it?) “Good suffering” is suffering I declare to na’s Personal Representative for Human Rights,
be necessary for my development, that I can con- highlighted the gap between public perceptions
vert into power and knowledge. of the kinds of detainees at Guantánamo and
Alas, distress does not strike on command but the reality that many are very low-risk. She also
bursts upon us, especially in the modern, trivial commented that whenever a European newspa-
form of catastrophe represented by the accident. per ran a story on Guantánamo, they ran the
There would be no torment or grief if we could typical picture of a hunched-over detainee in an
assign a reason and a meaning to all injuries. But orange jumpsuit. She said that “we need better
we can’t, and that is why pain remains unnamable, pictures” and urged us to turn the story around
atrocious, and neither makes us wiser nor teaches by showing low-risk detainees in a better light.
us anything. What an illusion is in the Stoic —U.S. Mission to the European Union
practice of praemeditatio, the anticipation of future
ills the better to avoid them. Thinking that we We have begun to suggest the possibility of Bel-
can make death, illness, or privation easier to bear gium stepping forward from the chorus line and
by preparing for them day and night is a sure way up to the footlights on Guantánamo. Helping
to poison our lives, to spoil the slightest pleasure solve the U.S. government’s—and Europe’s—
by imagining its end. How much more lucid is a problem with Guantánamo is a low-cost way for
lack of foresight! Belgium to attain prominence in Europe.
Among us there is not, and probably will —U.S. Embassy Brussels
never be again, the kind of wisdom with regard
to suffering that existed among the ancients, “I’ve just thought of something,” the king [Abdul-
because that wisdom presupposes a balance lah of Saudi Arabia] added, and proposed im-
between the individual and the world, and this planting detainees with an electronic chip con-
balance has long been absent, at least since the taining information about them and allowing
beginning of the industrial revolution. We bow their movements to be tracked with Bluetooth.
our heads before sickness and aging, but this This was done with horses and falcons, the king
very temporary docility will be abandoned as said. [White House adviser John] Brennan re-
soon as human ingenuity makes it possible to plied, “Horses don’t have good lawyers.”
change previously accepted norms. How sad it —U.S. Embassy Riyadh
is, for example, to think that one is going to die
of a disease, a virus that will be curable in a few While Germany prefers non-Uighur cases be-
years—that one is leaving too early. Pain is a cause of expected tension with China, it will
fact. We don’t need to make a religion out of it, consider the cases of two Uighurs based on hu-
and we can make only temporary armistices manitarian grounds. [German Interior Ministry
with the inevitable. There is in the world a great State Secretary Hans Bernhard] Beus under-
impatience with misfortune and suffering, be- lined Germany’s preference for detainees who
cause the progress already realized makes the have some ties to Germany, noting that this
immensity of what remains to be done odious. connection would provide the government with
What Cesare Pavese called the “bestiality” of a “plausible” explanation for accepting certain
distress prevents us from establishing relation- detainees when faced with the argument that
ships with it that are not chaotic and uneven. the United States should be resettling them.
Any serenity in this matter would be merely the —U.S. Embassy Berlin
result of fatigue. What we are awkwardly grop-
ing toward today is an art of living that includes Chinese Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan Zhang Yan-
an acknowledgment of adversity but does not nian went on at length about what a “slap in
fall into the abyss of renunciation. the face” it was to China that the Uighur de-

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