Job's visit from three friends, as imagined by William Blake in his 19th-century illustrations retelling the Old Testament tale. Job has just lost his wealth and children and is covered in boils because God wants to test his faith. The friends try to comfort Job, but their conversation about why bad things happen to people only makes him feel worse.William Blake, 1825 (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)
Michael Ignatieff’s latest book, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times, will be published next week.
At the 2018 Winter Olympics, the impossible happened. A Canadian women’s hockey team lost. Even worse, they lost to the Americans. After the game, the team had to attend the medal ceremony. When the silver medal was placed around the neck of their standout defensive player, Jocelyne Larocque, she took it off. Asked later if the silver medal had been any consolation, Ms. Larocque said, “Once we reflect. But now, not at the moment.”
I began writing about consolation four years ago, to try to understand how we cope with loss and failure, how we deal with the death of loved ones, and what resources we can call on when these events take over our lives. The story about the hockey team brought home how reluctant we all are to think about losing, how little we want to think about the process of consolation we need to undergo to recover hope. The consolation prize, after all, is the one you don’t want to get. Accepting a silver medal means accepting defeat. No wonder the player didn’t want to put the medal around her neck.
Jocelyne Larocque, middle, refuses to wear her silver medal at 2018's Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea.Bruce Bennett
Olympic officials then told Ms. Larocque she had to wear the medal, so she showed up for the photographers wearing it and looking desolate. They wanted her to obey the rules of sportsmanship, and these are all about being graceful in defeat. But a visceral dislike of losing is what makes competitors into champions. Green Bay Packers coach, Vince Lombardi, used to growl, “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser.”
Yet in life, lose we must, and not just in sports, not just in our professions, but in the most intimate parts of our lives. We lose more important things than hockey games. We can lose loved ones, our health, our sanity and we can lose a country, as the exiled Afghans know. Losing is built into the very fabric of human existence.
Consolation is the struggle to give meaning to loss so that we can go on and believe in ourselves again. It’s tricky and painful terrain because it’s so hard to be truthful. You tell yourself you did your best, but really? You tell yourself you left nothing on the field, on the table, on the rink, but really? Wasn’t there one extra ounce of effort in you?
The only real consolation is being truthful, but nothing is harder. We avoid the truth because it doesn’t necessarily set us free. It can dry up our reservoirs of self-belief and leave us damaged.
That’s why consolation can be the work of a lifetime. There will always be a moment when failure returns, when that sinking feeling takes you over and you recall the time everything was on the line and you fell short.
When that happens, we cross the desert, as the French say, and we cross those burning sands alone. We think failure is all our fault. When we lose someone we love, we feel loveless and alone. We slink around our neighbourhood, wishing no one could see us. Misery loves company, but often, our misery drives other people away.
If we have wise and patient friends, they can help wise us up. A good friend is there to say: I know, I know, I’ve been there too. They recall us to the reality that we are not alone. Failure is not solitary, but in fact a brotherhood, a sisterhood, a secret company. We all fail. We all lose. Welcome to the club.
God speaks to Job from a whirlwind, dismissing his complaints by reminding him that he doesn't know the whole story of the universe: 'Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?' he asks. Job asks for forgiveness.William Blake, 1825 (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)/Public domain
We seek consolation for losses that are ours alone, but there are other times when we need consolation for events that are not personal at all, that we share with everyone else. Then we seek consolation from history itself, from the narratives we’ve always used to make sense of our times.
After the planes flew into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon on 9/11, I needed to be consoled, to be told that our lives were not irrevocably changed, that one day we would stop feeling frightened and that this spectacular display of hatred would not prevent us from living our lives and trusting strangers from other places and faiths.
Even now, 20 years later, I’m not sure we have managed to console ourselves for 9/11. It remains a shattering break in the fabric of our lives and a suppressed part of our selves still worries that something like this could happen again, when we least expect it. For those who lost loved ones that day, the heartless brutality of it all makes consolation difficult, if not impossible.
This may be how we live our lives these days, in fear and trembling, without the narratives that once did their work of reassurance and comfort. Citizens of Western democracies did once believe some consoling stories about history. One such story was about the triumph of democracy at the end of the Cold War. We thought we had won. We believed democracy and liberty were safe. Now we’re not so sure. Another narrative was about Canada, the country we’re lucky to call our own. Nowadays, in the wake of finding children’s graves around the sites of the residential schools, the national narratives we grew up with look like exercises in false consolation, hiding realities we should have faced long ago.
Another grand narrative we liked to believe was a fable about progress, one that promised us better health, longer lives, greater freedom through science and technology. These days, we’re not so sure about that one either.
Climate change brings us face to face with progress as nemesis: the technical and scientific advances that make our lives better are the driving forces that risk making our planet uninhabitable. So if we are to continue believing the fable of progress, science and technology better find ways to save the planet before it’s too late.
Demonstrators carry a mock coffin, filled with charcoal to represent the burning Amazon, at a protest in Sao Paulo this past September.Andre Penner/The Associated Press
As with climate change, so with pandemics. That story of progress gave us globalization, and globalization gave us a pandemic that went around the world in a matter of weeks. If SARS hadn’t done so already, COVID-19 woke us up to the fact that global interdependence had brought peril in its wake. So now, the future of our fable about progress hangs in the balance. Whether we can still go on believing it depends on what science proves able to do, through vaccination, through further research, in transforming a pandemic into a routine winter illness. We’ll get there, I believe, but the double-sidedness of progress, leaves us with few grand narratives that restore our faith in the human enterprise.
The surprising fact is that the collapse of grand narratives hasn’t left us speechless or alone. During the global lockdown in March, 2020, there was an outpouring of attempts to console each other. At home I listened online to an orchestra in Rotterdam, each musician in their own homes, playing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, to cues on their earphones. In Berlin, Igor Levit played concerts every night from his apartment. Elsewhere on the internet, poets declaimed, rappers rapped, singers sang, all seeking to break out of the isolation of lockdown. In Barcelona, New York, Toronto, Buenos Aires, Rome, every evening at a fixed hour people would open their windows and bang pots and pans or sing, to thank the care workers who were saving lives in hospitals across town. In place of grand narratives, we were able to invent new rituals that affirmed who we are and what we believe.
As the months have gone by, as deadly variant succeeds variant, as the pandemic grinds on, the moments of solidarity and euphoria in the first lockdown are giving way to a grim sense that the tunnel seems to have no end and the light we keep being promised keeps receding. Consolation is about rekindling hope, and hope is not in abundant supply.
What we need, above all, is not to feel alone. Consolation is the process by which we escape our solitude and begin to re-establish our bonds with others. It is an act of solidarity in space, for example, to open our windows and bang pots together, but also an act of solidarity in time, re-establishing our connection to those who lived through events harder to bear than our own and whose experience can still speak to us.
My own search for this solidarity across time led me to reread the great works of consolation in the European tradition. I began with the Book of Job, that bitter story about how God tests Job’s faith with terrible punishments, how the old man challenges God’s injustice and how God answers him out of the whirlwind. I took heart from Job’s refusal to mutely accept his suffering and saw, in his questioning of God, that impulse to seek meaning that leads us to ask, why me? When I turned to the Psalms, the consolation they offered was in their descriptions of fear and loneliness. The Psalmists understood so clearly what we need consolation for. Even now, the friend who truly consoles us is the one who seems to really know what we are going through.
When I then turned to the New Testament, I was drawn, above all, to St. Paul’s own struggles to hold on to his own faith, after three decades building Christian communities throughout the eastern Mediterranean Roman empire. Paul came to understand that the Messiah was not returning anytime soon and the consolation that he could count on, in the end, was not just the hope of heavenly salvation, but the love of human beings for each other here on Earth, the love he immortalized in his epistle to the Corinthians.
St. Paul, as shown in a 12th-century mosaic at the cathedral in Trieste, Italy.The Art Archive / Basilica San Giusto Trieste / Dagli Orti
Today, I and many others are heirs of these religious traditions and of the revolt against them that began in the European Enlightenment. The great Western philosophers rebelled against the Christian afterlife because it reconciled people to earthly suffering and injustice. In place of Christian resignation, Marx believed, there must be a revolution to build heaven here on Earth. We are still recovering from the damage these dreams of revolution left in their wake. In the 20th century, the great artists of consolation -- Albert Camus, Primo Levi, Anna Akhmatova -- refused revolutionary and religious consolations alike. Their task was to take on the burden of bearing witness to the crimes of their age. After Auschwitz, after the Gulag, the burden of consolation was to find some way to go on believing in human beings and the human enterprise in any form.
In the 21st century, some of us still hope there is a heaven, where our sorrows will end, while others believe there is only our human community here below to console us, banging pots from our balcony windows, sharing music and poetry, creating new rituals that rescue us from being marooned alone with our suffering.
In recovering the history of consolation, I learned that there is always someone who seems to understand what we’re going through. It may be Cicero, or Marcus Aurelius, Boethius, or a contemporary poet, artist or singer. But if solitude is what harms us, to be consoled is to discover that in fact we are never alone. Somewhere in the past, or close by in the present, is someone who knows exactly what we are feeling at this moment.
It is here, I think, that hope is reborn -- in discovering that people like us have been through times much harder than this, have endured losses worse than ours and have left behind words of such power and truth that, when we read them, we suddenly understand ourselves anew, and recover the faith we need to go on.
I also learned something else that cuts against this message of hope, but also reinforces it as well. It is that life can sometimes be just too hard to bear. Human beings can be rendered truly inconsolable. This tells us, I guess, something about the fragility that needs to be respected in every human being. We can be damaged beyond repair. We are resilient creatures, but there are limits to our resilience. We are communicative creatures, but there are limits to our ability to communicate what we endure. Consolation takes us to the outer limits of what language can express, and there are moments, in the face of grief and loss, when words fail us. So when we see desolation in someone else, it calls on us not to look away, but to recognize a feeling that one day may be our own, a moment when we come face to face with who we truly are. It is when we have felt something of our own vulnerability, our own desperation that we can begin to offer others the gift of hope and consolation.
Job and his family celebrate after God, his test complete, restores Job to prosperity.William Blake, 1825 (Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington)
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