Misfortune has no favourites. (Or perhaps it does?) Like rain over the border of two countries, two states, over the imaginary line on a map where the name of a sea arbitrarily ends and another begins, over people (insistent or compelled to apply the same cartography to their hearts), agony, misfortune, Tragedy, strikes us all.
The strict impartiality with which this blind sovereign decrees over our lives, whose indiscriminate fiat so resembles chance, whose intractably indifferent eyes terrify us, weaves sympathy in the crumpled fabric of our hearts. For we all are his subjects, some already adjudged, others, yet to be. Sympathy then, is as natural to our hearts as is sorrow. Even if it has (for the moment) the heart of another, as its object.
Sympathy, though ‘extant’ (I am more disheartened than nihilistic) has found a newer majoritarian threshold of practice among people today. The very nature of the forces (economic, political etc.) that shape and govern our lives have silently formulated within us a ‘cost- benefit analysis approach’ to almost everything.
The silent internalisation that saw its unnoticed completion one ordinary day, within us, (thereon) made us fully view ourselves as nothing more than a statistical entry, an insignificant dyne of the vast economic force whose primary purpose was to purchase, consume, sell and work.
We have unfortunately extended this same consumerist approach to our ability to sympathise. We find ourselves unable to sympathise unless the aggrieved satisfy us of their ‘legitimacy of suffering’. Our consumerist eyes have adopted a misunderstood sense of ‘Impartiality’, ‘objectivity’. Amongst those that suffer, whose agony we are obligated to share, we remain like bad asking judges with our own atrocious questionnaires. What we are really doing is asking ourselves: ‘Is it expedient to sympathise, to be a human being, now?’ Our hearts have turned to conch shells and the soft mollusc of sympathy within, rarely shows itself now, or perhaps it has long died.
We have insisted on the articulation of agony, dismissing everything that does not come with its own grammar of articulation. To articulate then in such a world, becomes the aggrieved’s duty. This articulation is most unnatural when it is forced. It compels the aggrieved to necessarily view themselves as victims rather than naturally pass through their grief. In doing so, we make the process of grief subservient to self- analysis. The aggrieved must evaluate each of their wounds before they can weep over them. Sadly not all survive our interrogations, sadly some, for the fear of failing this test of articulation, never convey their grief, their sadness. Some, enter dark solitude, wishing that perhaps left unseen something might heal. Yes, some understand the futility of suffering in an insufferable world; some wish their wounds would understand this.
Why do we not seem to understand, sympathy is not a currency in which we transact the balance sheets of others’ misfortune. Why do we not understand, we all share some portion of the same, continent heart.