Hope, comfort is possible

◎ Miao Wei

In 2017, at the Utrecht Choral Festival, four choirs sang all 150 Psalms, and scholar Ye Liting was invited to give a speech between performances. The theme of his speech was about justice, but watching the choir performance with the audience allowed him to discover another theme, which was "comfort.". In the years that followed, he made "comfort" a project, and in March 2020, covid-19 put the world in a huge predicament, and Ye Liting published his book On Comfort, which tells about works of art that bring comfort, including Akhmatova's poems, Camus's novels, Mahler's music, and El Greco's paintings.

Psalms

Ye said the word "comfort" has lost its meaning once rooted in religious traditions. The culture of success pays less attention to failure or death, and comfort is given to the loser. There is a sense of tragedy in both the ancients and moderns, and we all acknowledge that some losses are irreparable; there are states that we cannot recover; and there are scars that can be healed but will not disappear. However, in the face of the noisy times that invade our consciousness and frame our lives, we should maintain a certain degree of self-control, look at the comforts that our predecessors have received and given, and make our hearts more resilient.

The first text that Ye Liting talked about was the Psalms, "Even if I walk through the valley of death, I am not afraid of being harmed, because you are with me, and your rod and rod bring me comfort." "What is the use of comfort in the face of pain and loss? Ye Liting said that only when there is hope, comfort is possible, life is still meaningful to us, and hope is possible. Judaism and Christianity reject the acceptance that we were born to suffer and die, and consolation depends on this belief, so "consolation" is inevitably a religious idea, even if the meaning given to us can be non-religious or even anti-religious. Religion has many functions, one of which is comfort, explaining why human beings suffer and die, and why, despite these facts, we should still live in hope. Defoe has a novel called "The Age of the Plague", and the protagonist travels through the plague of London, and his spiritual pillar is Psalm 91, "You will not be afraid of the horror of the night, or the arrows that fly in the day, nor the plague of the night, or the poison that kills people at noon." Though a thousand servants have fallen beside you, and ten thousand servants have fallen to your right, this plague must not come near you. ”

"We sat down by the BabylonIan River and cried at the thought of Zion. We hung the violin on the willow tree there. This is Psalm 137, and it begins with lamentation and ends with a curse. It reminds modern Jews of their relationship to their ancestors, understands the enduring anger of those who were driven out of their homes, that black slaves in North American colonies and Caribbean plantations can understand the suffering of captivity, and that the Psalms are the source of the hymns sung by enslaved people, creating a strong evangelical tradition in the Black Church in the United States. The authority of the Psalms lies not only in expressing sorrow, but also in expressing anger. Its creators are men and women like us, who know what banishment and loss are like, they know what despair and loneliness are like, and countless people have felt the same way for two thousand years. They ask God to explain the intolerable gap between the real world and the world they want, they ask why justice is so slow, but they assert that they know what justice is. In the secularized modern world, ancient texts like job and Psalms still have the power of comfort.

Aurelius' Meditations

Let's take a look at the worldly people. Aurelius, we met the Roman emperor in the movie Gladiator, who discussed combat deployments with his generals during the day and wrote something for himself in the camp at night. What he had seen and heard in the battle disturbed him, and he saw a hand or a foot dismembered, or a head cut off, and as he rode through burning villages, the stench of corpses remained in the folds of his coat, and he could not bear the stench of the soldiers as he inspected the legions. Unable to sleep at night, he wrote on papyrus, not in Latin but in Greek, which was his confession room. "Tell yourself at the beginning of each day: Today I will encounter interference, ungratefulness, rudeness, betrayal, malice and selfishness."

For a Roman emperor whose mission was to build monuments, to establish provinces, to conquer barbarians, to expand the empire, to leave behind busts of himself and to prove his greatness in marble inscriptions, the sense of nothingness might be even stronger when he suddenly realized that his time in the world was only a short stay in a foreign land. He asked himself what had been left since the time of Emperor Vespasian a hundred years earlier—"Men and women were busy getting married, raising children, getting sick, dying, fighting, feasting, joking, farming, flattering, boasting, scheming, cursing, complaining about fate, love, hoarding, coveting power and dignity." So many lives without any trace of survival are really chilling. ”

His anxiety deepened in the dead of night, and he thought his life drama had five acts, but a voice told you that you only need three acts, and three acts are all.

Aurelius died of the plague at the age of 59, in a military camp about 40 km from present-day Belgrade. He is immortal not because of the decrees or conquests remembered by his contemporaries, but because of a secret activity unknown to no one, the book of Meditations he wrote to himself in the middle of the night, from which posterity saw the confusion and pain that an emperor could not control, and the only way was to think alone and survive the night.

Boitius, The Solace of Philosophy

Three hundred years later, the Roman Empire declined and the barbarian Ostrogothic kingdom ruled Rome. Born after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Poitius came to a wealthy family, as if living under God's protection. As a young man, he translated the works of Plato and Aristotle, and then entered politics in the service of King Theodoric, who in 523 AD ordered the execution of Boitisius for treason. In a cramped prison, Poitius fell into despair, "of all the misfortunes," he admitted, "the most unfortunate thing ever has been happiness." ”

He wrote, And The Solace of Philosophy is a prison work. He was full of white hair, and his skin hung loosely on the fragile skeleton. A visitor arrives unexpectedly, it is the "goddess of philosophy", the goddess rebukes Poitius for resenting fate, she reminds him, as the Stoic philosophers have always emphasized, life is not always unsatisfactory, the goddess of destiny dominates everything, you must always be prepared that the goddess of fate will take away what is given to you at once: love, family, children, wealth, fame and career. These are not the things that a wise man should believe in, they will disappear in an instant, and what cannot be taken away is what Stoic philosophy calls the inner fortress, and the goddess of philosophy made Boitisius focus on what fate cannot take away, that is, reason.

While awaiting execution, Poitius awakens the profound palace of memory to cope with his own predicament. Hope in God will not be futile, and prayer will not be futile. Avoid sin and cultivate virtue. Restore faith and hope for honesty. If you are honest with yourself, you have a great incentive to do good, because you live in the eyes of a God who sees everything. ”

More than a thousand years later, Gibbon wrote a history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He said that Boytius's book was too vague and too profound, but the labor of the mind could divert the author's attention, the fearless calm was only a performance, and only death could end his suffering. The executioner, whom Gibbon called the "Messenger of Death," arrived, and without a trial, tied Up Boytiu, strangled him with a rope, and strangled him until his eyes popped out of his eye sockets, and then tapped with a stick.

El Greco

In the small Spanish town of Toledo, there is a medieval church called SanTome, where countless tourists go to admire El Greco's painting "The Funeral of the Count of Olgas". The painting depicts two saints burying Count Orgas. The upper part of the picture is heaven, the lower part is earthly. The body descended to the ground and the soul soared to heaven. The Count of Olgas was a Spanish nobleman who was buried in the Church of SanTome in 1323, and in the 1580s the parish priest commissioned the painter El Greco to depict the count's funeral and the legends that arose around it. It is said that when the Count of Olgas was buried, St. Augustine and St. Stephen appeared from heaven to help the mourner bury him.

In the foreground of the painting, St. Stephen and St. Augustine, dressed in gleaming golden robes, are bending down to gently place the count's remains into his grave. Overseeing the scene was the parish priest who was the client of the painting. Just behind the two saints stood a dozen prominent citizens of Toledo, dressed in black with white lace tied to their collars. An angel fluttered above the heads of the gentlemen of Toledo, guiding the earl's soul into heaven. There, St. John, Jesus and his disciples, were waiting for the soul of Count Olgas.

It is a painting of a time of confusion, the count wearing sixteenth-century steel armor, St. Augustine, who died at the fall of the Roman Empire, and St. Stephen, who was stoned to death in 34 AD, all dressed as the protagonists of the sixteenth century. The gentlemen of Toledo are painted into funerals held more than two hundred years ago. This is not anachronistic error, but the painter wants to show that the layers of time all appear in the never-ending present, and that believers can dwell in the past, present, and future as long as there is enough faith. The gentlemen of Toledo were not surprised to see Augustine and Stephen appear, as if they were attending a regular Sunday morning Mass. The collapse of time is the most natural thing in the world, and this painting depicts how faith unites communities to accept the supernatural.

The painter painted himself into the painting, and also painted his own son into it. The boy must have stood in the studio day after day, watching his own portrait take shape, watching his father try to express his longing and his comfort. The little boy stood next to St. Augustine and St. Stephen with a torch. He was about eight years old and wore lace collars and short pants. He stared at the painter. Time can settle us, it is one-way, it cannot be slowed down, it cannot be reversed. The future is unknowable, the past is irretrievable, and for us time ends in death, while for others, time goes on as if we never existed. The ecstasy of this painting is coming from the dream of escaping time. This feeling of escaping time can only be imagined through art, not experienced through life.

Montaigne's Essay

In the same year that El Greco was writing The Funeral of the Count of Olgas in Toledo, seven hundred and fifty kilometers away, Montaigne began to write the third volume of Essays. He was fifty-six years old and still full of energy, but the kidney stones made him so painful that he thought he was going to die. He had lived through religious wars and plagues, and as he grew older, he admitted that any attempt to comfort himself was ultimately deceitful and "covering up trouble." No one can share death with us. Human empathy has strict boundaries, and no matter how great a person's wisdom is, he can never fully understand another person's grief through his own judgment alone. He said that being alive is indeed a great thing — but only if you accept it all: pleasure, pain, feces, and the joy of humble bodies. He did not believe in God's grace or God's mercy, but in our love and attachment to life itself.

Hume

In 1734, a 23-year-old Scottish gentleman wrote a letter to a doctor who specialized in the treatment of neuropathy. He told the doctor that he had done his best to fight his depression and despair. But the appointment letter was not sent, and David Hume, who had been apprenticed for several months in a shop in Bristol, moved to La Fleischer, France. He lived in seclusion for four years and wrote a book called The Theory of Human Nature, in which Hume said that the pillars on which Western reason depended—causation, identity, soul—were fictional. Later, he wrote several more books and became the most famous atheist of his time. He said that prayer and faith are false comforts, that human beings created God to explain and endure the injustices and harshness of life, and that there is no comfort in such fictions. In the founding texts of classical economics by Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson, they both say that social order is maintained through the satisfaction of each person's own needs and cooperation with others in the division of labor, rather than relying on a common fear of God's punishment or hope of his eternal return.

Beethoven, Mahler

In 1804, a 23-year-old pianist named Dorothea von Ertmann lost her only child. She fell into a deep depression. People tried to comfort her, but to no avail. When Beethoven heard about this, she went to her house and sat down at the piano and played for an hour, and Dorothea cried for the first time. After playing, Beethoven stood up, shook Dorothea's hand, and left without saying a word.

Hymns, hymns, oratorios, and masses have been comforting the grieving. The Messiah, which opens with the well-known phrase "Comfort you, My People," premiered in 1744. Mozart's Requiem was composed in 1791. Verdi and Brahms also composed The Requiem. In Brahms's Requiem, the cause of grief is the death of his mother. In Verdi's Requiem, it was the death of his friend Alessandro Manzoni. This tradition is inherited by the son of a Jewish innkeeper in a small Czech-Moravian town. At the age of 15, he went to Vienna to study music. Arriving in the capital of the Empire, he poured all the ambitions of a foreigner into the music, and Mahler believed that music should strive to provide meaning to life for people "after God's death", providing a transcendent and sublime experience, and that music must always contain a yearning. He said in a letter, "What do you live for? Why are you suffering? Is this a huge horrible joke? If we are to survive, we must answer these questions. ”

Mahler's compositions contained autobiographicality, including his brothers and sisters who died prematurely in the First Symphony, and he composed "The Song of the Dead" in 1902, composing music for Luctra's poem of the same name. The poem was written in mourning for the deceased, and four years after Mahler composed it, his beloved daughter Mary died prematurely. Mahler once lamented, "The death of her beloved daughter is indeed the reason for the mourning of this song." In the Sixth Symphony and the Song of the Earth, we can still hear Mahler's incessant sadness.

Some experiences can only be expressed by music, and some things are indescribable. Music has a "floating intentionality", music is about the feeling of something, but refuses to explicitly indicate what it is. Music requires the listener to complete its implicit meaning, and when we do, we have a sense of understanding our own emotions, which is at the heart of the comforting experience. However, in the initial stages of suffering, we may not resort to music at all. A person in pain may not have time to appreciate beauty. Maybe a few years later, when you listen to a musician play a piece of music, the memory comes back and the tidal effect of the music appears. So much so that you sit in the dark hall, not letting people on either side see your tears, with gratitude, because the music has relieved you, and the work of comfort has finally begun. This delaying effect, sometimes years, sometimes decades, comfort can be a lifetime of work.

Akhmatova's Requiem

In Leningrad in 1938, at the entrance to Kresty Prison on the banks of the Neva River, there was a long line of women wearing thick cotton coats to ward off the cold. Akhmatova was also in the procession, and she came here to visit her son Gumilev. It was a time of terror and people were arrested every night. Usually these women don't talk because they know they can't trust anyone. But on this day, a woman turned back to Akhmatova and said, "Can you write all this down?" Akhmatova replied, "I can." Then, the first woman's face seemed to have an expression that resembled a smile. The woman asking the question may not know the identity of the woman next to her, a 49-year-old widow with no income, but she is the most appropriate witness. Akhmatova wrote this scene at the beginning of her poem Requiem.

Requiem was written for every woman who kept vigil outside Russian prisons in the 1930s, as well as for those who were held in prison awaiting interrogation, torture, exile or execution.

We don't know if the woman in the queue who asked the question survived the siege of Leningrad, we know nothing about her fate, only her smile, we know she longs for her experience to be saved so as not to be forgotten. She probably also didn't get a chance to read the requiem, a poem that began circulating in manuscript form in the 1940s and was eventually published in the 1960s.

Isaiah Berlin was the first person in the West to read the Requiem. In the autumn of 1945, when he visited Leningrad as a British official and found Akhmatova alive, he went to see her in an empty room at Sheremetyev Palace. He was the first Western visitor Akhmatova had seen in twenty years. She read him the Requiem, and at one point the poet stopped and said, You come from a human society, where we divide into human beings and—she didn't finish speaking, and fell into a long silence. In the darkness, her son Gumilev came in, and the three of them ate a plate of cold potatoes together. Berlin later recalled that Akhmatova had no slightest self-pity, like an exiled princess, unhappy and unapproachable, and her voice calm. The war was over, her son went home, and she expressed the suffering of the people. It was a call that she had no choice but to take, and a mission she was willing to take on.

Milosz 'The Gift'

Ye Liting takes us on a journey of comfort, and in the book's afterword, he recalls the pain of his parents' death. He said, I recognize that comfort is both a conscious process and a deep unconscious process. This is the hardest but also the most rewarding job we have ever done. In this slow, roundabout, almost unconscious way, you will find comfort. You can even learn to appreciate failures for teaching you how to know yourself. Failure, he says, is a great teacher, and so is aging. As we age, at least one false consolation has disappeared—the illusion that we thought was special. Failure and older age teach us to get rid of any illusion of particularity that once gave you the ability to be free from stupidity and misfortune, but it is delusion and self-deception.

Ye Liting's afterword ends like this:

In January 1998, Ye and his wife entertained the Polish poet Milosz at their home in California. The poet, 87 years old and in exile for forty years, was moving back to his native Poland, sometimes wondering if he could see a free Poland again. He cared for his sick wife, watched her weaken until she died, and he cared for his mentally ill son. Now he's finally home. Milosz recited a poem to Mr. and Mrs. Ye Li Ting called "The Gift."

Such a happy day.

The fog cleared early in the morning, and I worked in the garden.

Hummingbirds stop at honeysuckle flowers

There is nothing in this world that I want to possess.

I know there is no one who deserves my envy

Any misfortune I have suffered, I have forgotten

The thought that I am the same person today does not embarrass me.

There is no pain in me.

Straightening up, I saw the blue sea and the sails.