ON CONSOLATION

The noted academic and former politician examines the nature of consolation as a means of helping us accept the tragic reality of our lives.

“Consolation is what we do, or try to do, when we share each other’s suffering or seek to bear our own,” writes Ignatieff. “What we are searching for is how to go on, how to keep going, how to recover the belief that life is worth living.” The author is generous in providing cases in point. Foremost is Job, the biblical figure whom God tested with exquisitely awful punishments. The great lesson of Job, Ignatieff suggests, is not that he eventually bows to his tormentors, but that he teaches us to “refuse the false consolations of those who deny what we have endured.” The author then turns to the Psalms, which “have enabled men and women in pain, throughout the ages, to grasp the commonality of their experience.” Both Job and the Psalms, he adds, give us the language to express our hurt. Cicero may not have been the greatest model of probity, but the Roman philosopher adds to that literature, as does Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic emperor, whom Ignatieff credits with setting a noble example: “For it is consoling to know that not even an emperor can get through the night, alone with his thoughts. That is something we can share with him.” Montaigne turned to his thoughts, alone in his tower, in the face of a terrible religious civil war that had lasted for 30 years. Having witnessed the peasants in the countryside around him prepare for their plague-borne deaths by digging their own graves and awaiting the end, he found consolation for his impending demise. Marx and Lincoln also figure in these pages, as does Cicely Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement. Ignatieff concludes that consolation is a species of grace, which makes the consoler an angel in disguise.

An inspiration for those in need of words to carry on with life.