The strength that yields to temptation

An Ideal Husband
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Oscar Wilde
Act 2

Sir Robert Chiltern:
Weak? Oh, I am sick of hearing that phrase. Sick of using it about others. Weak? Do you really think, Arthur, that it is weakness that yields to temptation?  I tell you that there are terrible temptations that it requires strength, strength and courage, to yield to. To stake all one’s life on a single moment, to risk everything on one throw, whether the stake be power or pleasure, I care not—there is no weakness in that. There is a horrible, a terrible courage. I had that courage. 

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Perhaps it isn't apropos to draw any connections between a Wildean comedy and a Shakespearean tragedy, but I think there is something of Macbeth in Sir Robert's sentiment: the nightmarish courage involved in yielding to a heinous and horrific temptation. The royal greatness Macbeth sought was not the greatness he ultimately achieved. It was his willingness to grasp the nettle, to embrace an impossible and appalling ambition, that finally thrust him into tragic greatness. Lady Macbeth was overcome by a spot of blood; Macbeth found the will to wade through a river of the stuff. For so many years that has been the image I've associated with Macbeth: a single, battered figure, trudging through thick water, soaked to the bone with the mortality of common men, tearing fear and fate and morality off his back—compelled by a strength and courage that is as implacable as the doom that reaches for him from behind. 

"And betimes I will, to the weird sisters:
More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know,
By the worst means, the worst. For mine own good,
All causes shall give way: I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er..."
Macbeth, Act III, Scene IV

The common hero

Tragedy and the Common Man
_______________________
- Arthur Miller

In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy - or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.

I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classific formulations, such as Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.

More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.

As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.

Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate himself justly.

Talking about life

"I think students go to my lectures and come away with an impression; they don't come away with a body of knowledge (even though that's my intention when I start off behind the lectern)! However, the moment my passionate momentum takes me out from behind it I know I'm finished with the solidly prepared lecture and off talking about life."

"You see, I found myself wondering about how we measure achievement in this school, in many schools. Grades? Scholarships? Universities? Level of degree? I've started asking students what they would rather have--a place in Columbia, or someone to love? Getting into Columbia is hard but so is finding someone to love. In fact, Shakespeare tells us that if you are clever it's even harder to find love. In 'Much Ado About Nothing', Benedick says to Beatrice, 'You and I are too wise to woo peaceably.'

I was delighted to find that this girl 'has a boyfriend'--it's no consolation prize; love is the greatest treasure anyone can find."

"Grades are after all just grades--we already know, don't we, who the really talented people are. 'And (...) has a boyfriend.'"

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To the man who always left an impression--his impression--of life, love and literature, thank you for being a mooring rope for the crews of students too eager to set out to sea. For the reminder that when we forge ahead into the future with drive and ambition, we leave certain things behind.

The people waving from the shore, the ideas and dreams we grew up with, the budding love we left to be watered by the salty spray of our departure--these are the things we remember when we are all out at sea, set for distant shores and uncertain glory, but longing for nothing more than a cloak of loving arms and the humble palace of home.

Happy retirement, and safe journey on your own way home.

Trust

Trust lies somewhere in between love and fear. It is planted somewhere in the shadows, in the patches of ground we hope no one treads, watered with furtive glances and nervous sighs. We wait for the light but we hate its coming. But when the sun rises we will know: whether it is flower or fungi we have been sheltering from our gaze, or whether we have been gardening withered blossoms and a broken stalk. 

Trust cannot be recovered; it must be regrown. But not before we cry like mothers in the night, mourning dead babies. 

Don't you know that when you leave others to pick up the pieces, their fingers bleed for you?

Whether the wax weeps

In the endless, tumultuous battle between head and heart, I have learnt this summer that sometimes it's best not to take sides, not to trust in the sequences of logic nor the odd throb of intuition. But to let life take its course and sweep aside the indecisions of thought and feeling in the momentum of a moment, plowing through dream and delusion alike with the force of destiny. 

But I want to say also that I'm sorry for the carnage I left behind in all that thoughtlessness and unfeeling. And those candles I've tried to blow out, but where the flames have simply refused to die and continue trembling in my wake. I see the lights at night, dancing in the distance, and wonder whether the wax weeps. And I silently, selfishly hope they never dim. 

To you, and to me

To those who laugh at love and think it unreal, or impermanent, or unimportant, or fanciful, or powerless:

1 If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. 3 If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

4 Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. 5 It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. 6 Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. 7 It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

8 Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. 12 For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

You shall love your crooked neighbour with your crooked heart

As I Walked Out One Evening
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W. H. Auden

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.

'But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
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What cuts the deepest in the poem are the little ironies that Auden sprinkles from verse to verse, the easy incongruity that underlies and undermines life, natural as rhyme. The pallor of night in the evening sky, the trauma of a field chopped down for harvest, the hollowness of the lover’s declarations of eternal love as he stands framed by an arch that inevitably rises and falls from point to point, as do the trains on the railway which rush onward to a final destination. Ironies quickly lapse into absurdities in the lover’s speech, but Auden’s more subtle jokes never go away. The first love of the world—that of Adam and Eve, which ended in the first sin and the introduction of death into the world. 

Neither is the speech of the clocks free from Auden’s scorn. For the clocks do not heed their own warnings: the personification of Time as if it were something humanly comprehensible, the whirring and chiming of the clocks as if it were something to be broken down and brought under control. And in the end their deceit and self-importance are laid bare. When the evening darkens, when love and its songs have faded, when time passes without the chiding of the clocks, the only thing left unchanged is the river: brimming at the start of the poem and still running deep at the end, but insensitive to notions of first and last. It has neither spilled over nor dipped under, and I cannot be sure what Auden meant but perhaps the only thing certain is that the river does not brim with promise; none has been given and none should be expected. The waters run, and run deep, but they are silent.