"About Suffering They Were Never Wrong"

The old saw about suffering is that unless you are a hero, nobody notices. The mark of tragedy is the amplitude of the fall. How many people are affected? Even when hurricanes wipe out entire cities, the people affected are not noticed for more than a moment. They are victims not of their own choices but of whimsy. Hence, the situation is pathetic rather than tragic. We do not use the word "tragedy" correctly. Willie Loman, the common tragedy according to Miller, is buried with only his family and a neighbor in attendance.

The touchstone for this is Brugel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." And in modern times, of course, Auden's poem, "Musee des Beaux Arts." Somewhere, I know, it is Sunday and the sun is shining and the air is cool, the wind fresh, and people eat and drink and shop. It is pleasant, a day to remember.

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.