Mental anguish

 

Subject: Mental anguish.

By writing people try to put down thoughts about others in society and about society itself,  in fact writing is about the writers aptitude  to put themselves  into the lives of others comparing their own emotional circumstances with people in the news.

Each morning we wake up to read and hear of the trouble people are in across the globe, we can chose to discard this news or we can comment on it by providing our own perspective to the story. If we comment the thought which goes into the comment usually gets us a little closer to understanding the problem and the plight of those caught up.

Russian literature is full of this genius for writing about the human condition. The Russian condition was one of vast space coupled with harsh weather, it’s politics were of the contrast between extreme riches and poverty which interact in a way we could barely understand in the West. The insoluble divide between poverty and riches was described by their authors in different ways, as was the torment in the minds especially of the poor. The  novels of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky  and Solzhenitsyn were introduced to me, not through a literary class but through my youthful love of a Jewish librarian, who in my devotion for her and an overriding willingness to please, hooked me to these masters of human insight. Throughout the plots the characters reached an inevitable mental tipping point which embraced lives of depredation and depression often leading to desperate acts. We are taken on a journey by the author, well outside our comfort zone  and jolted  into a totally different reality.

In todays world at large we are not much further on, given our opportunity to alleviate so much of the mental suffering through science and social intervention our disconnect from others still drives some to despair  We know what needs to be said and done but the task asks a lot, especially if pleasure is found easier elsewhere.

Each news story is the tip of a social  iceberg, the carnage created by shells and bombs  in Aleppo is only the outward sign of the carnage delivered within. Those children and adults in Syria or Yemen, the Dalits in India,  even the drugged up kids in Warrington all deserve our consideration but of course the solution seems so out of reach, so immense so prolonged that we rather flip the program to some banal American sitcom.