A personal letter on attachment, self-sufficiency, and the difficulties that come with taking leave of others.
S.R.,
Just a few hours ago I said goodbye to a good friend of mine, perhaps for the last time.
We’ve parted in the Vietnamese city of Da Nang, and she is currently on her way to Bangkok. I’m not sure when I’ll see her again, if ever – although she’s planned a tentative stay of two months, and will return here to Vietnam thereafter.
It is often the case that our certain plans become certainly derailed by the course of life’s events.
I’ve only known her for the few weeks that we’ve been travelling together, and yet in that time have developed an intimacy only found with the progression of time.
Friendship, I think, does not permit of being measured in days, but only degree (though I grant that the strength of the bond is only increased by duration).
Her leaving has left me with a slight melancholy, which is to be expected; I have the unfortunate disposition of intense grief at even the smallest slights of fortune, and particularly the loss of individuals.
Let us, though, review what philosophy has to say, and perhaps this sadness can be abetted by a little reflection.
Cicero, in the Tusculan Disputations, delineates the Stoic approach to comfort and mourning:
“The first remedial step therefore in giving comfort will be to show that either there is no evil [in the occasion for distress] or very little; the secondwill be to discuss the common lot of life and any special feature that needs discussion in the lot of the individual mourner; the thirdwill be to show that it is utter folly to be uselessly overcome by sorrow when one realizes that there is no possible advantage.”
(Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, Book III, chapter 32, section 77. Translated by J.E. King.)
On the first point, there is, of course, little or no evil in something such as farewells by the Stoic conception; virtue is the only good, and vice the only evil, and the farewell itself (and every other such departure) merely the opportunity for the exercise of the former, or the lapsing into of the other. Vice is, after all, our natural inclinations unbridled.
There is such a thing as mourning (i.e., sadness) in excess – when it surpasses the limits prescribed both by reason and by nature.
On the second point, what is meant by the common lot of mankind is, I think, self-evident. There is nothing in the world immune from disruption or decay; our possessions, our relationships, and we ourselves are subject to forces outside of our control. Our sphere of action is limited to what little we can do, what little we can truly hold on to, and the entirety – rather, the majority – of what we think. It is a fact of life that the persons and things in our lives are impermanent (though this fact by no means detracts from their value). And so the comings and goings of people and things in our lives is constant.
What we fear in these instances is loss. There is nothing, however, that we lose in these instances – we have only exchanged one thing for another.
Virtue is the knowledge that we are perfectly self-sufficient, despite the ephemerality of external things.
And so says our Seneca,
“To lose someone you love is something you’ll regard as the hardest of all blows to bear, while all the time this will be as silly as crying because the leaves fall from the beautiful trees that add to the charm of your home. Preserve a sense of proportion in your attitude to everything that pleases you, and make the most of them while they are at their best. At one moment chance will carry off one of them, at another moment another; but the falling of the leaves is not difficult to bear, since they grow again, and it is no more hard to bear the loss of those whom you love and regard as brightening your existence; for even if they do not grow again they are replaced.
“But their successors will never be quite the same.‟
No, and neither will you.
Every day, every hour sees a change in you, although the ravages of time are easier to see in others; in your own case they are far less obvious, because to you they do not show. While other people are snatched away from us, we are being filched away surreptitiously from ourselves.”
(Seneca the Younger, Epistulae Morales, Letter 104. Translated by Robin Campbell.)
Cicero’s third point is a reflection on the utility of mourning – that it is futile to mourn beyond natural bounds. That we mourn the loss of some person or some thing in our lives is natural, and, all the same, a selfish display. We lament not so much that they have departed, but that they have left us behind.
And in this vein Seneca begins one of his letters,
” I am very sorry to hear of your friend Flaccus’ death.
Still, I would not have you grieve unduly over it. I can scarcely venture to demand that you should not grieve at all – and yet I am convinced that it is better that way. But who will ever be granted that strength of character, unless he be a man already lifted far out of fortune’s reach? Even he will feel a twinge of pain when a thing like this happens – but only a twinge.
As for us, we can be pardoned for having given way to tears so long as they have not run down in excessive quantities and we have checked them for ourselves. When one has lost a friend one’s eyes should be neither dry nor streaming. Tears, yes, there should be, but not lamentation…
In our tears we are trying to find means of proving that we feel the loss. We are not being governed by our grief but parading it. No one ever goes into mourning for the benefit merely of himself. Oh, the miserable folly of it all – that there should be an element of ostentation in grief!”
(Seneca the Younger, Epistulae Morales, Letter 63. Translated by Robin Campbell.)
Seneca’s position is admittedly more empathetic than that of other Stoics, e.g., Chrysippus, Epictetus, Cleanthes; the sage (the man beyond fortune’s reach) is permitted the pain of loss, but not the upheaval of the self that we often associate with severe loss, e.g., at the death of a close friend. The sage feels the pricks of fortune because he is human, and yet is able to overcome them because he is something approaching the divine.
There is no great loss in saying goodbye.
Admittedly, I think that there is no parting that is permanent, and cleave to this in a way that is perhaps more based in faith than in reason.
I’m touched at moments like these by something from the writings of Jorge Luis Borges,
” To say goodbye to each other is to deny separation. It is like saying “today we play at separating, but we will see each other tomorrow.” Man invented farewells because he somehow knows he is immortal, even though he may seem gratuitous and ephemeral.“
(Jorge Luis Borges, Delia Elena San Marco in Dreamtigers. Translated by Mildred Boyer.)
And I’m reminded of how nonchalantly I said goodbye to you in Dun Laoghaire over a year ago.
Farewell.
Sincerely,
George