I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
James Hollis writes of the biblical story of Job in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally Really Grow Up:
Job experiences a revelation, a transformation of perspective, and declares that his widely proclaimed piety was based on a hubristic assumption that his compliant behavior compelled God to treat him well. Job realizes that there is no deal, that such a deal is a presumption of the ego in service to its now familiar agenda, which promotes its own security, satiety, and continuity….
[Job] experiences a radical revisioning of self in the world, a crisis of assumptions that awaits all of us, in so many different venues. Each of us, from childhood on, engages in magical thinking similar to Job’s, believing we can strike deals with the world and with the divinities. These “deals” are part of how we attempt to protect our vulnerable selves in an omnipotent and often inscrutable universe.
Hollis continues:
[Sooner] or later, life brings each of us not only disappointment, but something worse, a deep disillusionment regarding the “contract” that we tacitly presumed and served to the best of our ability….
Periodically, all of us lose our understanding of the world, our means of coping, our plan for prevailing. Each of these nodules of negation will be experienced as a crisis; it is a crisis of a belief system. Such a crisis is an existential wounding and a spiritual wounding as well.
One belief I have a hard time putting down is the idea that if I do everything right then I can have a happy, conventionally successful life. And yet my own life, and that of others around me, puts the lie to that.
Just because you study hard, go to a good college, find a nice and responsible partner, have children, build financial security, buy a house and so forth doesn’t mean you get to have a happy life.
All the clichés I’d like to believe — “everything happens for a reason,” “it’s either a blessing or a lesson” (implying if something bad happened it’s just teaching you something that will help you in the future), “things don’t happen to you, they happen for you,” etc — express this naive view that the world is good, God is just, and things always work out for the best.
In fact, people (and animals) get sick, age, deteriorate, have traumatic accidents, and always die. One might say this is for the best, because who would want to live forever? Not me.
Hollis wraps up his discussion of Job:
Once again, out of the experience of suffering, an invitation is found. As our brother Job learned, our presumptive contracts are delusory efforts by the ego to be in control. We learn that life is much riskier, more powerful, more mysterious than we had ever thought possible. While we are rendered more uncomfortable by this discovery, it is a humbling that deepens spiritual possibility. The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite newsletter authors Jessica Dore has recently been writing about Job. She writes of two thinkers theologian Catherine Keller and playwright Christopher Fry who consider the story of Job to be comedy, not tragedy. In the epilogue, Job gets everything back, so this is one superficial reason one might call it comedy (tragedies end in downfall and suffering; comedies in harmony, joy, and, often, reconciliation).
Comedy may be what rescues us from the wounding we suffer when our plans for achiving success falter or fall apart entirely. Dore writes of Fry’s perspective on comedy:
Fry wrote that the difference between comedy and tragedy was that of intuition and experience. The intuition of comedy may not expose the founding conditions of existence in the same way experiencing tragedy does, but for Fry that did not make it less important. Comedy had special value, especially when “being realistic” meant rejecting all that was not quantifiable, or where pressure prevailed to attend to catastrophe only. Joy, of course, matters too. And the joy of “unmortifying” oneself, the task of Fry’s comedic characters, was not about being naive or dismissively bright-siding, but a “hard-won maturity of delight…active patience declaring the solvency of good.”
I’ve been working on a newsletter article about the tragi-comedy tv series Patriot from Amazon Prime, which I recently finished watching. And reading Simon Critchley’s book Tragedy, The Greeks, and Us. Coming across Dore’s discussion of the book of Job as comedy at the same time confirms my emerging belief that the kind of story or narrative I want to live is tragi-comedy.
Because life is both tragic and comic and if you only have one of those you don’t feel the full range of human possibility and emotion. Leaning towards one or the other is a form of nihilism.