Listening in puzzled silence, I sat across the table as an old acquaintance justified his “special friendship” with another man’s wife as the way “these things happen.”
He interrupted himself in the middle of a bland enumeration of the reasons he thought his friend should leave her husband, break up her family, and marry him, to recount how his wife had left him fifteen years earlier for another man, a person she chose because he was more compatible with her interests and temperament.
He mentioned his ex-wife without a flicker of emotional pain in his words or on his face. “Here, finally, is someone who has moved on successfully,” I thought.
He saw in his “special friend” a person more compatible with himself than his first wife. He said he was more compatible with his friend than her own husband was. He began to enumerate their compatibilities, but shifted into a catalog of incompatibilities between him and his ex-wife. From that list, he began itemizing the similarities between his ex-wife and his friend’s husband. On that subject, his tone moved from tepid to luke-warm. The inventory of characteristics shared by his ex and his friend’s husband grew. His tally concluded with the assertion people like he and his friend could never be happy married to people like that. He assured me he was grateful his ex-wife had helped him realize this.
As he went through his catalog of similarities and differences, compatibilities and incompatibilities, I had to remind myself his wife had left him years earlier for yet another man and not for his friend’s husband. I became lost in the tangled morass through which he was leading me, wandering like a dull docent, directing his hundredth tour, a bland off-hand reference to the exemplary qualities of his friend, then, displaying an ever-so-slightly more spirited affect, recounting the shared traits of his ex and his friend’s husband.
At a loss for words, I managed to say, “These things do happen, but I think it’s not the best way or the only way.”
“No it’s not the best way, but it is the way,” his eyes shifted down, he nodded briefly, “Besides, we can’t help it; it’s just the way. . .,” his voice drifted up into a tentative query, “. . .these things happen.”
Sunday, December 17, 2006
Saturday, December 16, 2006
Not Forgetting What Lies Behind: Nice Revenge
Forgetting is not all we can do in response to life's tragedies. Forgetting may be our best choice, in many ways it is our easiest choice, but it is not compulsory. In a society that honors reciprocity over an agape-grounded golden rule, we are free to harm others--with revenge. Though the word “revenge” is harsh, so harsh we find ourselves wanting to deny it is imbeded in our culture, it still recieves aprobation. Our culture aproves “nice” revenge, tolerates displaced revenge, and is facinated by proxy and murderous revenge.
We like to cover our harshness--as we do all our ugliest urges--with a nice veneer. One veneered ugliness is whitewashed with the phrase, “Living well is the best revenge.” This is "nice" revenge, a witty quip held up as the positive response to betrayal and rejection. It has all the characteristics we honor. To live well is to move on, leave behind, forget about the tragedy. It is affirmative, positive, and gives us a cultural hero: one who is apparently healthy, wealthy, happy, and successful. We smile and laugh at the irony and justice when those betrayed or rejected find new and better relationships, but that smile is only a muscle twitch away from a grimace, and the same muscle contraction that powers a belly laugh also powers a racking sob.
Living well to show one has “moved on” is false, even pretentious. Eagerness to live well pushes people past loss without healing, without closure. Showing a good new life is easier than building an actual good life. Wounds remain, suppurating beneath happy veneers. Years after pain people become flushed and tearful when surprised by old remembered agony, even though they have by most external signs moved on to new relationships and lifestyle successess. The veneer of a good new life is thin and easily breached, easily undermined. The need to proudly display the new life leads one to ignore and avoid problems that should be addressed so new relationships may be truely as good as they appear. Additionally, living well to achieve revenge is an empty, ephemeral choice. T.S. Elliot underscored this when he wrote, “to do the right thing for the wrong reason is the greatest treason.” Evil motives for even the best actions poison the doer. The treason is not to others, but to one's own character. As harmful as hidden untreated wounds, the internal poison of revenge grows and festers until it cracks through the shallow surface of the good new life and reveals it to be pretense.
We like to cover our harshness--as we do all our ugliest urges--with a nice veneer. One veneered ugliness is whitewashed with the phrase, “Living well is the best revenge.” This is "nice" revenge, a witty quip held up as the positive response to betrayal and rejection. It has all the characteristics we honor. To live well is to move on, leave behind, forget about the tragedy. It is affirmative, positive, and gives us a cultural hero: one who is apparently healthy, wealthy, happy, and successful. We smile and laugh at the irony and justice when those betrayed or rejected find new and better relationships, but that smile is only a muscle twitch away from a grimace, and the same muscle contraction that powers a belly laugh also powers a racking sob.
Living well to show one has “moved on” is false, even pretentious. Eagerness to live well pushes people past loss without healing, without closure. Showing a good new life is easier than building an actual good life. Wounds remain, suppurating beneath happy veneers. Years after pain people become flushed and tearful when surprised by old remembered agony, even though they have by most external signs moved on to new relationships and lifestyle successess. The veneer of a good new life is thin and easily breached, easily undermined. The need to proudly display the new life leads one to ignore and avoid problems that should be addressed so new relationships may be truely as good as they appear. Additionally, living well to achieve revenge is an empty, ephemeral choice. T.S. Elliot underscored this when he wrote, “to do the right thing for the wrong reason is the greatest treason.” Evil motives for even the best actions poison the doer. The treason is not to others, but to one's own character. As harmful as hidden untreated wounds, the internal poison of revenge grows and festers until it cracks through the shallow surface of the good new life and reveals it to be pretense.
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