Sadness

I think that most readers of this blog don’t know that I am interested in the First World War (1914-1918). I’ll not tell here how this came about but the result is that many years ago I begun to take photos of monuments and sites related to this war, which I upload to a special section of my website (you’ll find them here: http://www.bijdeweg.nl/WO1-Inleiding.htm; the explaining texts are in Dutch, but just follow the links). In the meantime my website contains about 800 such photos. However, this is only a fraction of what can be photographed of this war. So now and then I travel to the battle fields of the Westfront in Northern France and Belgium – or elsewhere – in order to take new pictures for my website. Or I take pictures of those countless monuments behind the former frontlines, which you find everywhere in Europe (and outside Europe as well). Last month my wife and I made again such a trip. This time we went to the battle fields of the First Battle of the Marne (September 1914) and the Second Battle of the Marne (May-August 1918), northeast of Paris not far from Reims. We travelled around there, looked for and looked at the monuments and visited many war cemeteries as well (it’s unbelievable how many war cemeteries there are along the former Westfront and how many soldiers died there). And I took many photos, of course. However, for me, such a visit to battle fields is not an emotionally neutral affair. Since I always try to imagine how it must have been there in those days of the war, I see the many wounded lying and dying in the fields and the trenches. I see the many many dead everywhere on the ground. So one week being there is long enough for me, for it makes me very sad.

Now I am home again and I “must” write my weekly blog. Thinking of my trip to the Westfront, I thought that it would be a good idea to write about emotions, and especially about sadness. So I looked up Aristotle says about emotions. I found that in the Nicomachean Ethics he calls them “feelings accompanied by pleasure or pain” and that he also says “By emotions I mean appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, love, hatred, longing, emulation, and pity”. (1105b21) In his Rhetorica he even gives a list of fourteen emotions. Next I took Spinoza’s Ethics from my bookcase, where I read that for him sadness (or pain) is one of the basic emotions. It signifies “a passive state wherein the mind passes to a lesser perfection.” (Part III, prop. XI, note). Or should it be better to write about emotions and sadness by discussing Martha Nussbaum’s book Upheavals of thought? It’s another option. But would these words really capture what emotion is and especially what sadness is? Then I realized that often a picture says more than 643 words (the number of words in this blog). Actually, pictures can better express what emotions are than words can do. So this time you get a pictorial blog. Look at the emotional photo here on the top of this blog, look at the face of this soldier carrying his dead comrade, and you know what sadness is. (click on the photo, in order to see it better; use the escape button – not the backspace – in order to return to this blog).

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Description of the monument

Monument for the 42th US Division (the Rainbow Division), situated 8 km south of Fère-en-Tardenois in the Aisne department in France. It represents a sergeant from the 167e regiment from Alabama who carries a comrade fallen during an attack on a nearby farm, 25-26 July 1918. The bronzed statue has been made by Britannique James Buttler and it has been inaugurated on 12 November 2011.