Of Sadness

I am amongst those who are most exempt from this passion, for I neither much esteem nor much affect it, though the world has undertaken to honor it with a peculiar kind of reverence. The Stoics clothe it in wisdom; the poets celebrate it. But for my own part, I think grief, however just its cause, is always an unprofitable guest — it consumes us without improving the occasion that summoned it.

There is a notable difference between the first stroke of a misfortune and its settled weight. When Psammenitus, King of Egypt, saw his daughter pass by as a prisoner in a wretched habit, while all his friends about him wept and lamented, he himself stood firm and dry-eyed, without speaking a word. Not until he recognized one of his old servants reduced to begging among the captives did he burst into tears, crying aloud. The great sorrow had frozen him. The lesser one thawed him.

“Extreme grief is dumb. When the passion reaches its highest point, it overwhelms all expression — but when it begins to ease, the voice finds itself again, and weeps.”

This, I think, is the truth of it. The tears we see are already a sign of relief, not of the deepest torment. Those who lose a child and are seen weeping at the funeral have already passed through the first, speechless hour of it. What we observe in them is the wound beginning to breathe — which is also the wound beginning, at last, to close.

For my own part, I distrust the spectacle of grief more than the grief itself. There is a kind of performance in loud mourning that serves the mourner more than the mourned. The soul that sits quiet in its darkness may be suffering more truly than the one that weeps in company. I do not say this to condemn the tears — they are natural, and they heal — only to note that silence, too, has its dignity.