Woe, this is fun

Why do we let ourselves be lured into attractive promises of tender and loving grace, while the inevitability of transience hovers above our heads as clouds of irony?

Was dumped today, pretty abruptly too. Along with this, a friend shared some poetry with me that was directly salient with this situation. The poems were: “The Listeners” by Walter de la Mare, and “Sonnet 29” by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Here are the links:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148560/pity-me-not-because-the-light-of-day

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47546/the-listeners

She speaks of the throes and woes of love initially as transient yet periodic; as “the light of day” which “at close of day no longer walks the sky”, as wintry “fields and thickets”, among other poignant metaphors. Through this, there is a sense of persistence and endurance, saying “pity me not”. She arrives at a new point on line 7, of “man’s desire” being “hushed so soon” whence he will “no longer look with love on me”. But she already knew this - the next line says as much.

Here her approach deviates from my preferred strategy of controlled emotional countenance and goes full sad boi, likening this not to ephemeral yet steady rhythms of nature, but to a “great tide” “strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales”. Finally, we are left on a muted note: “Pity me not that the heart is slow to learn / What the swift mind beholds at every turn.”

Immediately one can surmise why this is salient, probably by line 2. Here we have a meditation on the tragedy of sapience and sappiness, on our own (or at least some people’s) unquenchable desire of validation and affiliation in people who we can assume to be only as reliable as ourselves - which is to say, only just.

The sense of hope that pervades the first portion is nowhere to be found, and we are left with a sinking feeling of having been here before. The periods of hope for love are a helpless and senseless want of something which we know to be a contradiction. One could elaborate on the clash of the mind and the heart that is pointed out, but this would only lead us to a millenia-old discussion on free will, as old as The Republic! Indeed, with modern advances at the frontier of psychology and neurology, we have found that the answer is: it's complicated, and it depends. I'll refer you to Pinker's book "How the Mind Works" and Judith Harris's "No Two Alike" for some cheerful reading. But I digress - despite modern advances in understanding of the mind, the tragedy remains, as evidenced by Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo, and yours truly, writing this crap at 5 AM.

But what can we do, ourselves? Surely there must be a solution to this problem! Indeed, this may be simply part of one's everlasting conquest towards wisdom and understanding of our fellow sapiens. We can aspire to self mastery, bridge building, and uplifting! Mope and hope begone, trounce tragedy and make something beautiful from a miracle of a life that was always finely grained enough for an entire ocean of sustenance! Not hope, for hope is that sweet juice that paralyzes our agency and throttles our willpower. Not hope, but action. Go and do something! I decided to write, you might decide to run, or to fight, or to fly away to New Zealand.

I've forgotten to write about the second poem, which I will probably do sometime soon.