The year of living dangerously
by Bob on February 16, 2007
I saw the film "The Year of Living Dangerously" some years ago, in 1982 in the theatre in New York City, when people still mostly went to theatres to see films. It follows the mayhem in 1965 in Indonesia.
Okay, now it has been my year of living dangerously in a strained situation mostly. It metaphorically parallels the turmoil in the film, except that my life's seeming turmoil is situational and also a bit internal.
I never thought life would be such a huge challenge in so many ways. The business of living. The means of living. The love of living. The cost of living.
Remembering Friedrich Nietzsche and his many works and quotes, I cautiously remember one which said something like 3am is always the dark night of the soul. And he said there was only one consolation at that dark moment. That one could end it all, sayeth Nietzsche. He had always flirted melancholia.
Well, I am not sure about that. What is the point of having struggled so many years or psychologically so many years (Freud had said that psychological time does not correspond to wall clock time) to just give it up in a moment's time ? I hardly see the point. But it's a choice. George Howe Colt wrote a good book on it in 1992, entitled, The Enigma of Suicide: A Timely Investigation into the Causes, the Possibilities for Prevention and the Paths to Healing.
Self-termination is a very selfish undertaking it would seem. It ignores the ones we leave alive and who we love, and those who love us. Not a good deal.
William Shakespeare in one of his sonnets said that the problem of death is only a problem for those left living. Obviously. I think also he was talking alchemically and spiritually which good old Will frequently did.
I read on someone's web page recently "Love is Suicide". Now that is a scary outlook. One always aspires to be in love, especially mutual love, rather than an supremely sad, one-sided, unrequited love in ether direction. But the concept of "falling" in love is indeed a tricky one. Falling is not exactly fun for most people save for acrobats. Even they might not like it. Love of that sort is not a planned fall. It is being swept off one's feet, like falling into a manhole in the street.
So maybe love is a consolation for Nietzsche's dark hour of the soul.
William James also wrote on "the sick soul" in his Varieties of Religious Experience. James writes that "Failure, then, failure! so the world stamps on us at ever point. ... The subtlest forms of suffering known to man are connect to the poisonous humiliations incident to these results . And the are pivotal human experiences. ..." He then quotes Robert Louis Stevenson who wrote that we are not allowed to suceed and that failure is the fate allotted. Hmm.
Ah, one remembers the "Consolation of Philosophy" by Boethius in 524 A.D. He also wrote on arithmetic and mathematics.
So, we wind up with the magic square, not from Durer's "Melancholia", but the timeless (it was even in ancient China represented by beads) magic square of so-called Saturn.
4-9-2
3-5-7
8-1-6
Hardly a Sudoku, but well worth a look at.
One has consolation in the dark hour of the soul.