 | By Peter Catapano Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
It happened a few weeks ago. I haven't told many people because it sounds, well, I don't know, trite. Your cat? There is much greater suffering. Wars, violence, disease, homelessness, abuse. And we are immersed in it. The sizzle reel of human misfortune is always playing. Even in happier times, on days assigned to celebration and gratitude, like Thanksgiving, it is hard to tune out. |
Despite all such logic, I wept plenty in the veterinarian's procedure room as I held the cat and felt the life go out of him and gently stroked his head for the last time. On the way I home, I walked past several of my fellow New Yorkers camped in cardboard box shelters in the cold, dressed in soiled clothes, their possessions piled into shopping carts and milk crates. I did not cry. |
The calculus of our joy and suffering is bizarre. It isn't a calculus at all. |
Two weeks later, I was speeding comfortably on an Amtrak from Penn Station to Washington, D.C., on a crisp fall day to see my daughter for the first time in 49 days. The sun shone. It seemed to dance on the rivers and bays. We had lunch in the nation's capital, then drove home to New York, where soon our family will gather to eat, drink and revel in one another's presence after an extended time apart. I was beaming. I did not think about Ukraine or Uvalde or any fresh hell. I did not miss my cat. |
What is the meaning of all this? |
It was Margaret Renkl's Opinion essay this week on giving thanks in a perilous world that got me thinking. At the start of a holiday season that seems to demand that we count our blessings, Margaret calls on the memory of her role model in this regard: her father, whose cheerfulness amid a life that was far from ideal was an act not of mere politeness or chirpy positivity but of courage and transcendence and must have laid some of the groundwork for the persistence of hope in her life and work. |
These moments that complicate and defy our sense of reason are often the ones our best writers and poets describe so well. Margaret recently turned to a poem, "The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats, to capture the sense of political instability we now face. Her essay this week made me think of the English Romantic poet John Keats and his idea of "negative capability," a state in which one is "capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." This capacity, expressed so beautifully in Keats's poetry, allows us to rest in what we perceive as beautiful and true — the Grecian urn, the nightingale's song — despite the noisy, ceaseless attempts at knowledge-seeking and sense-making going on around us. |
In these pages in 2015 the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, reflecting on his remaining days in the shadow of the cancer that would soon take his life, wrote: "I shall no longer look at 'NewsHour' every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming." And then, in a sentiment that must ring true for so many at this moment: "I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return." |
Programming note: The newsletter will be off on Thursday and Friday for the Thanksgiving holiday. |
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