Week in Seven Words #341

automated
The express checkout machines are marvels of futility. People run their coupons back and forth to no effect, swipe cards that aren't read, feed bills that get spit out. A sign flashes. "Help is on the way," intones a ghostly female voice. Does anyone come?

cheery
As we pray on a Friday evening, an ice cream truck starts to crank out music, and we laugh.

commiserate
People who are suffering don't need to hear that they should have had perfect foresight; that if only they'd acted perfectly and anticipated a dozen possible eventualities, they wouldn't be suffering.

moribund
An old fridge, speckled with mold, its belly full of warm food.

spilling
Sometimes when she talks she falls into a rhythm similar to stream-of-consciousness. It doesn't really matter who she's talking to; she just needs to empty her mind of stories and details. Sometimes she expresses a hope or wish, or she makes things up to give the impression that her days are full of excitement, accomplishments, and closeness to people.

targeted
Insults that contain a truth I'm squirming to avoid.

withdrawing
It hurts watching kids quickly give up on something because they're afraid of looking stupid.

Beethoven's Heiligenstadt Testament (read for Deal Me In 2017)

When Beethoven was in his early 30s, he addressed a letter to his brothers explaining his withdrawal from society and misanthropic behavior.

He tells them that for several years now he’s been losing his hearing and can’t bear the thought of people finding out. He considers the humiliation, the wounds to his pride:

Oh, how could I possibly admit an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy or ever have enjoyed.

This is a common response to personal struggles - self-imposed isolation, to spare oneself from pity or insensitive reactions. He expresses its agonies, the fear of exposure warring with the desire to be understood.

What’s most powerful in his letter is the tension between craving life and desiring an end to his suffering. He admits that he considered suicide. What mostly held him back was an urge to keep working on his music. Though virtue, too, might have played a part in holding suicidal thoughts at bay, he emphasizes the role of art even more: “Oh, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had forth all that I felt was within me.”

Continuing to live to see out one’s potential, and what one can keep bringing to the world, even in the face of suffering and uncertainty, means everything. It isn’t something that can be encouraged through platitudes or rote admonishments. It’s bloody and raw and hard-won (and can be easily lost too). It’s everything.

Beethoven lived another twenty-five years after writing this letter. Here’s his last symphony, courtesy of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on their YouTube channel:


I read this letter as part of the Deal Me In 2017 challenge.

Nonfiction Book of the Month: Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

Written by a psychiatrist who survived Auschwitz, it's a book that will change your life.

I'll just leave an excerpt here:

As each situation in life represents a challenge to man and presents a problem for him to solve, the question of the meaning of life may actually be reversed. Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.