SENTIMENT AND PATHOS
Like the old jazz standard, I find myself 'in a sentimental mood'.
In a mood such as this, it's random acts of kindness that break your heart - more so than cruelty or spitefulness.
Here's an anecdote that evoked feelings of full-on pathos for the other woman involved: my mum was walking me in my pram along a canal bank, near the tannery that was quite close to our street in northern England.
A woman in her sixties came scuttling along from the opposite direction and asked "Is my hem coming down at the back? Is it hanging down? I haven't got time to go back and tack it up! I've got to go to work!". The woman was clearly distressed about it and in a hurry. (Actually, this story reminds me a bit of the mad hatter - or the character who was always late - in Alice in Wonderland. Particularly since it was a weird, industrial landscape with chemical odours wafting out from the tannery)... My mum examined the woman's garment and sure enough, the hem was unravelling along the seam where it had been manufactured or taken up. The woman looked imploringly at my mother to help her, and my mum felt tenderness for her. She untucked my blanket, unfastened all of my babyclothes, undid my nappy (this was before the days of disposables), and gave her my nappy pin to temporarily repair the skirt.
They parted ways in opposite directions, after the woman had thanked her heartily several times.
Similarly, when I was in the Brownies (doing my duty to God and the Queen - haha), we set up a roadside stall selling 'cream teas'. We were dressed in the funny brown uniform with white knee-length socks... but let's say we weren't exactly rushed off our feet. It wasn't particularly successful. A woman who must have been heading for retirement age came past and the look on her face was telling. We made eye contact - I remember it 20 years later - and she clearly had feelings of tenderness and probably pity for us. She suggested to her husband that they stop for a cup of tea and scone. He wasn't keen but she prevailed upon him. She didn't have the heart to keep walking, like my mother with the hem-lady. I remember that, for the twenty minutes they were there, there were no other customers; they sat alone at the tables we had set out in the gardens, cutting solitary figures.
Everyone must recognise what I mean here? Maybe this woman remembered her grown-up daughters as children. Maybe she had never had children. Who knows? The response is all it's possible to know, not what it's borne out of. Perhaps some of us are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others... and some characters who present hard exteriors to the world do so in spite of tremendous underlying sensitivity.
Kostoglov was like this in Cancer Ward. This is a superb novel/satire. An apparently tough, hard man, towards the end of the book Kostoglov visits a zoo on his release from the cancer ward. Someone had blinded a monkey. The sign at the zoo, on the empty cage, reads "The litle monkey that used to live here was blinded because of the senseless cruelty of one of the visitors. An evil man threw tobacco into the Macaque-Rhesus's eyes". In spite (because of?) the tremendous hardship and suffering of both Kostoglov and his comrades - the incarceration in a gulag for no reason, the gruelling radiotherapy he undergoes, the death and suffering of other patients, the disappointments in love... We are shown that it is (ostensibly - and this is, of course, the point) the monkey's suffering that affects him most keenly.
A few days after the zoo, Kostoglov is on a train. He's been discarged from hospital and he's heading away to re-start his life: "The train shuddered and moved forward. It was only then that, in his heart, or his soul, somewhere in his chest, in the deepest seat of his emotion, he was suddenly seized with anguish.... An evil man threw tobacco in the macaque-rhesus's eyes. Just like that..."
I've been typing quickly and spontaneously (except for finding the paperback) and it has occurred to me that there is no internal logic to this post. I have moved full circle from my initial, italicised point. Perhaps that's just how it is sometimes.
Like the old jazz standard, I find myself 'in a sentimental mood'.
In a mood such as this, it's random acts of kindness that break your heart - more so than cruelty or spitefulness.
Here's an anecdote that evoked feelings of full-on pathos for the other woman involved: my mum was walking me in my pram along a canal bank, near the tannery that was quite close to our street in northern England.
A woman in her sixties came scuttling along from the opposite direction and asked "Is my hem coming down at the back? Is it hanging down? I haven't got time to go back and tack it up! I've got to go to work!". The woman was clearly distressed about it and in a hurry. (Actually, this story reminds me a bit of the mad hatter - or the character who was always late - in Alice in Wonderland. Particularly since it was a weird, industrial landscape with chemical odours wafting out from the tannery)... My mum examined the woman's garment and sure enough, the hem was unravelling along the seam where it had been manufactured or taken up. The woman looked imploringly at my mother to help her, and my mum felt tenderness for her. She untucked my blanket, unfastened all of my babyclothes, undid my nappy (this was before the days of disposables), and gave her my nappy pin to temporarily repair the skirt.
They parted ways in opposite directions, after the woman had thanked her heartily several times.
Similarly, when I was in the Brownies (doing my duty to God and the Queen - haha), we set up a roadside stall selling 'cream teas'. We were dressed in the funny brown uniform with white knee-length socks... but let's say we weren't exactly rushed off our feet. It wasn't particularly successful. A woman who must have been heading for retirement age came past and the look on her face was telling. We made eye contact - I remember it 20 years later - and she clearly had feelings of tenderness and probably pity for us. She suggested to her husband that they stop for a cup of tea and scone. He wasn't keen but she prevailed upon him. She didn't have the heart to keep walking, like my mother with the hem-lady. I remember that, for the twenty minutes they were there, there were no other customers; they sat alone at the tables we had set out in the gardens, cutting solitary figures.
Everyone must recognise what I mean here? Maybe this woman remembered her grown-up daughters as children. Maybe she had never had children. Who knows? The response is all it's possible to know, not what it's borne out of. Perhaps some of us are more sensitive to this kind of thing than others... and some characters who present hard exteriors to the world do so in spite of tremendous underlying sensitivity.
Kostoglov was like this in Cancer Ward. This is a superb novel/satire. An apparently tough, hard man, towards the end of the book Kostoglov visits a zoo on his release from the cancer ward. Someone had blinded a monkey. The sign at the zoo, on the empty cage, reads "The litle monkey that used to live here was blinded because of the senseless cruelty of one of the visitors. An evil man threw tobacco into the Macaque-Rhesus's eyes". In spite (because of?) the tremendous hardship and suffering of both Kostoglov and his comrades - the incarceration in a gulag for no reason, the gruelling radiotherapy he undergoes, the death and suffering of other patients, the disappointments in love... We are shown that it is (ostensibly - and this is, of course, the point) the monkey's suffering that affects him most keenly.
A few days after the zoo, Kostoglov is on a train. He's been discarged from hospital and he's heading away to re-start his life: "The train shuddered and moved forward. It was only then that, in his heart, or his soul, somewhere in his chest, in the deepest seat of his emotion, he was suddenly seized with anguish.... An evil man threw tobacco in the macaque-rhesus's eyes. Just like that..."
I've been typing quickly and spontaneously (except for finding the paperback) and it has occurred to me that there is no internal logic to this post. I have moved full circle from my initial, italicised point. Perhaps that's just how it is sometimes.
