Is Suffering Happiness?
Remember those days when you were an English major taking a Romantic literature class and you had to painstakingly dissect every line of a poem to suss out the subtextual themes, obtuse symbolism, and poteninfinite [potentially infinite] meanings of words and phrases? Lord Byron, anyone? Andrew Marvell? Rod McKuen? What? You don’t remember? Oh. You weren’t foolish enough to think majoring in English was a solid career path? You could have warned me.
Fortunately, reading poetry today seems much less like walking into a tarpit (where no amount of thrashing about will save you, in fact just the opposite) and more like opening a window to let in a fresh perspective. Take “About Suffering” by Elisa Gabbert, for example, which is the Poetry Foundation’s Poem of the Day for June 16. The fourth line of Elisa’s poem states, “Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.”
When I saw those words, I thought, “Maybe this should be a ‘How to Be Happy’ blog.” No go. The problem is that Gabbert does not explain what kind of suffering she envisions or what the right reasons might be for enduring said suffering or how that morphs into happiness.
Later in “About Suffering” she tangentalizes [derails suddenly from her train of thought]: “Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered during his childhood from a tyrannical mother.” Fine. Everything was going along just swimmingly and then she suddenly springs open this door INTO THE TARPITS and I stepped right in. Is she trying to tell us that Turgenev found happiness in his suffering?
Okay, so now I have to look up Turgenev. Ivan Sergeyevich was a Russian (DOH!) novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, translator, and popularizer of Russian literature in the West (what a slouch!) who lived from 1818 to 1883. The quick and dirty about his mother, Varvara Petrovna Turgeneva, is that she “spent an unhappy childhood under a tyrannical stepfather (like father, like daughter I guess) and then inherited a wad when the stepfather died. Without a deeper, likely fatal dive into the tarpit, all I know about her relationship with Ivan is that she was “authoritarian.” There is a note, though, that she served as a model for a character he “invented” who was “an old, lonely, and bitter widow…who is without love and has grown cruel and isolated.”
Wait, now it is starting to make sense. Later in her poem, Gabbert writes, “One’s past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A tortuous luxury. Velvet upholstery.” So, Turgenev suffered at the hands of his mom as a child but found happiness in that suffering later in life because it served as fabulous fodder for fictional payback?
I don’t know. I still don’t have an answer, from the poem or my brain, as to whether suffering is happiness. Gabbert says it is, though, or at least becomes so “after forty minutes of desolate shuffling.” She also says, “About suffering, no one is ever wrong.” Maybe I should take her word for it.
(Image: Turgenev by Illya Repin, 1874. Public domain.)
