I published a book of essays two months ago, which I realized only in retrospect is a collection of meditations on pain, and since then I have been parsing reader reactions in an anecdotal sort of way. Here are some things that people have said about the essays: they are “harrowing” and “blunt”; “clear-eyed” or “unsparing.” They examine “hard truths” and “facts”; they force us to “see things not as we wish them to be, but instead as they are.” They offer “no false solace.”
I don’t think of myself as a particularly gloves-off communicator. But I have always been suspicious of sentimentality in any form, and perhaps this slightly obsessive quest to scrub my writing of euphemism when I talk about pain is what some readers are responding to in their comments. “The principal use of pain,” Simone Weil once wrote, “is to teach me that I am nothing”—and this has certainly been my experience. The fiction and nonfiction I read this year all circled around the key question (key to me, at least) of why remaining clear-eyed about the fact of our nothingness matters, morally speaking.
I began 2024’s leap into the existential void with Simone Weil’s lapidary, beautiful, occasionally maddening essay, “The Iliad or the Poem of Force,” in which she argues that the greatest war poem in the western tradition is in fact a philosophical meditation on how extraordinarily rare it is for humans to see each other clearly as equals. The main protagonist of the Iliad is not Achilles or Hector but “force,” humans’ shared subjection to death and chance, and how nearly impossible it is for those temporarily in power to imagine the humanity of the powerless. “No man exists who is not constrained, at some moment, to bend to another’s power,” Weil writes, and yet power is precisely what blinds humans to this reality. It is the universal nature of this vulnerability—Trojan and Greek each in his turn reduced to “nothing” at the whim of the other—that is the true lesson of the epic, along with the bitterness that men should be capable of thus transforming one another into “brute matter.”
I followed up with Iris Murdoch’s trilogy of essays, The Sovereignty of the Good, which takes up many of Weil’s same themes but swaps out the sometime-mystic’s cryptic aphorisms for the merciful clarity of everyday prose. “Goodness,” writes Murdoch, “is connected with the acceptance of real death and real chance and real transience and only against the background of this acceptance, which is psychologically so difficult, can we understand the full extent of what virtue is like.” And this is because accepting one’s own nothingness turns out to be a useful spur to seeing others in their flesh-and-blood reality, without the veil of ego-driven illusion that usually interposes itself between us and the world. “The humble man, because he sees himself as nothing,” Murdoch argues, “can see other things as they are.”
Now Reinhold Niebuhr, I acknowledge, is a thoroughly uncool addition to my reading list, but I cop to liking him. Despite its retro aura of rumpled gray suits and horn-rimmed spectacles and Cold War chain smoking, Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of Tragedy offers a clear-eyed case for how democratic politics, at their best, strive to balance humans’ dual nature: our species’ unavoidable drive to dominate others and make them the instrument of our wills, on the one hand, and our occasional, saving capacity for selfless love, on the other.
I read Joan Didion’s memoir Blue Nights, about her daughter Quintana Roo’s death. I was moved by how she treated this most eviscerating of personal tragedies—the loss of a child—with her signature style of cool detachment. “You’ll always have your memories,” friends attempt to console her, and she is having none of it. The book is, instead, a rigorous catalogue of all the times she and her daughter, in their thirty-some years together, missed each other or failed to see each other clearly. Blue Nights refuses the consolatory fiction that Didion’s love was enough to save her daughter. But in the manner of negative theology, the book’s patient record of absences testifies to that very love’s existence.
Finally, an essay I wrote four years ago, “J.D. Vance’s Political Mythology,” has unfortunately gained new political relevance. Re-reading it, it occurred to me that our personal failures to see each other clearly manifest, in politics, as potentially murderous fantasies—WWE’s cartoon bozos, bloodless clichés— whose sole purpose is to prop up Weil’s blind force, or power, while distracting us from the unpalatable but only ethically meaningful reality: our shared fate as creatures equally subject to chance and death. And I was reminded how important it is to puncture these fantasies, here and there, when we can.
Happy 2025!
