By DONALD DeMARCO
There are two incurable problems with life. One is that the world and its human inhabitants are imperfect, and the other is that we are mortal. Anxiety and death are persistently with us.
We can either spend our lives, therefore, in a state of dissatisfaction dreaming of a world that cannot be, or we can realize that the problems that we face can strengthen us as persons, and that this world, despite all of its attractions, is not our permanent dwelling place.
The poet E.E. Cummings, in his poem about what he calls “manunkind,” invites his readers to leave for that “good universe next door.” This, we might say, is dreaming, and has no practical utility. Why could not God have created a better world for us in which to reside, and perfectly kind human beings to make our lives fully enjoyable?
Perhaps no poet ever put the matter more succinctly than Omar Khayyam in Sir Edward Fitzgerald’s famous translation of the following quatrain of the Rubaiyat:
Ah Love! could you and I with God conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits — and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart’s Desire!
The wish to remake the world in accordance with our Heart’s Desire is pure sentimentality. It is feeling without wisdom. We might suspect that God could have made a much better world and modeled a much better human being. If we were given the opportunity to play the role of a Creator, would we not do a much better job?
And so man dreams. He wants to go through life without ever being offended, to have sex without tears, work without effort, opinions without criticisms, and friendships without disappointments.
The sentimental dream, however, has a nasty side to it. What happens when the dream fails to materialize and things go astray? What happens when the dreamer meets disagreement, resistance, opposition? What happens when people cannot abide life in an imperfect world and neighbors who are less than friendly?
Sentimentality can be a prelude to violence.
The sentimentalist talks about “quality of life,” “pointless suffering,” “the termination of life without meaning,” “wrongful birth,” “poor prospects for a happy life,” and so on.
Yes, every baby should be wanted. But what should we do with those who are unwanted? We are so compassionately disposed toward the imperfect child and toward the suffering adult that we are inclined to remove their distress by removing their lives. Abortion and euthanasia are born of sentimentality.
Sentimentality, in preferring more perfect and less annoying human beings, devalues the actual human being that we face on a daily basis. The Catholic novelist Walker Percy put it starkly when he said that “sentimentality and the consequent devaluation of individual human life lead straight to the gas chamber.”
Love, according to the Christian mandate, is directed to the other person exactly the way he is and not toward a more palatable representation of himself. This does not mean that we should be complacent about others, but that we meet them on the ground of reality and not on a level of sentimental idealism.
When Russia and the United States allied to save three stranded whales, the world applauded. Percy did not criticize the effort, but pointed out that in the same year a million Sudanese died of starvation.
Recently, a group of beachgoers came to the rescue of a seven-foot Great White Shark that was stranded on a shore at Cape Cod. They splashed its gills with water to help it breathe before it was safely towed back into the water. The Huffington Post called the rescuers “heroic.” A video of the rescue is available on the Internet for the world to admire.
While the shark was saved from certain death, however, hundreds of unborn humans were exterminated through abortion. “Americans are the nicest, most generous, and sentimental people on earth,” as Percy comments. “Yet Americans have killed more unborn children than any nation in history.”
When people get what they want, what they dream about, they remain unchallenged, and therefore undeveloped. Musicologist Leonard Meyer has put the matter nicely in stating that “only through our encounters with the world, through what we suffer, do we achieve self-realization as particular men and women.”
Encounters with reality seem to be the best counter-actants against sentimentality. Consider the plight of John Keats. It is the year 1819. He is living in exile, away from his family, and his beloved Fanny Brawne. He has gone to Rome to ease his tuberculosis. His prospects for a literary career seem hopeless. “I have written my name on water,” he remarks.
Two years before he dies, at the age of 25, he writes a letter to his family in England which shows remarkable maturity. “Man is originally a forked creature subject to the same mischances as the beasts of the forest, destined to hardships and disquietude.” There is no hint of sentimentality that clouds his vision of the human condition. The world is a proving ground. It offers us the opportunity to become an authentic self, as opposed to remaining a mere “intelligence.”
“Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and Troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways.” Despite his brief tenure on earth, John Keats is regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets that England has ever produced.
We should pray for what we need rather than for what we want. In other words, we should subordinate ourselves to a higher wisdom than our own.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review.
(His latest works, How to Remain Sane in a World That is Going Mad; Poetry that Enters the Mind and Warms the Heart; and How to Flourish in a Fallen World are available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum. He is the 2015 Catholic Civil Rights League recipient of the prestigious Exner Award.)
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