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| Mask of Solemnity |
March 25, 2012
Fooling God
La gravité est une mystère du
corps inventé pour cacher les défauts de l’esprit. «Solemnity
is an outward mystification devised to hide
inner faults.» [La Rochefoucauld, Maximes, V.257]
We
become solemn before mysteries we don’t
comprehend, but − La Rochefoucauld is right − we also pretend solemnity when we
don’t want to be understood: we use it as a way of disguising how callow we are
− or how ignorant or misguided. We use a solemn face to disguise confusion, but
also frustration and resentment. It’s another mask we wear − comedy and tragedy:
and the mask of solemnity.
***
Often
we’re solemn about grief, because we’re supposed to be; but is that the way we
feel?
A wise man once told me: “Never invite
grief; don’t be greedy for bitterness or woe. But, when grief comes, stop; wait.
Let the memories and the sadness meet you and walk through you at their pace –
march or stroll, meander, waltz, lope – until they go. Then you go, too. Go
your separate ways until you meet again.”
***
Grotesque solemnity. A phrase that his biographer
Henri Troyat uses to describe Chekhov’s view of many public occasions. People act
solemn, but they are grotesques. Here is
Chekhov himself (in his diary; he’s describing “a sumptuous banquet at the
Hotel Continental to celebrate the anniversary of the emancipation of serfs,”
Moscow, Feb. 19, 1897): “Boring and ridiculous. Eating, drinking champagne, making
noise, and giving speeches on the people’s self-awareness, freedom, and so
forth, while slaves in frock coats, serfs even now, bustle about the table and
coachmen stand waiting outside in the cold – it’s like lying to the Holy
Spirit.”
Can
you do that? − and get away with it? You’d think not. But Chekhov is also
reported to have said that, “One fine feature of art is that it doesn’t let you
lie. You can lie in love, politics, and medicine; you can fool people and even
God – such cases do exist – but you can’t lie in art.”
Even God. Maybe in this sense: we can
so profoundly deceive ourselves that even as we envisage ourselves standing
naked before God as he searches out our hiddenmost faults, we don’t imagine he
can see what we cannot.
***
One
more Chekovism, on religion (from his notebooks): “Between ‘God exists’ and ‘There
is no God’ stretches an immense space, which [even] the honest sage has great
difficulty crossing.”
In my part of the world, the distance
is between “There is no God” and “Here is
God, and I have him.” There are not only no sages in between, there
is no modesty at either extreme. There
is only the noisy self-confidence of the thought-less.
Because in addition to being solemn it’s always good to be loud.
p
(bicbw)
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