On sorrow

“The Grieving Parents” by Kathe Kollwitz, a memorial to her son Peter,

killed during the First World War (German war cemetery, Vladslo, Belgium)

Emotions are complex, and we all have them. It’s why Montaigne writes so often about them. For example, the second essay in Book I of his Essays is dedicated to the emotion “tristesse”, which can be translated as sorrow, sadness or grief. It’s an emotion many people have and maybe he has it more than the average people, Montaigne says. And – what he doesn’t say in this essay, though –wasn’t his whole essay-project built on this same emotion? Hadn’t Montaigne started to write his essays because of his grief for his late friend Étienne de la Boétie, a grief that again and again comes to the surface in his Essays? And the whole world is steeped in this emotion, whether we call it sorrow, sadness or grief, which are all aspects of the same, to that extent that the world “is pleased to grace it with a particular esteem, clothing therewith wisdom, virtue, and conscience.” Montaigne doesn’t like this. It is “foolish and sordid guise”.
Sorrow is a fickle, multi-faced emotion. It’s not “what you see is what you get”. The emotion you see on the face or in the behaviour of a human, doesn’t need to be the emotion that this person feels in the heart. It’s so for all emotions but maybe in particular it is so for the emotion of sorrow (to use one word for the sorrow-sadness-grief emotional complex). Montaigne illustrates this with several examples. First he tells us the story of Psammenitus, an Egyptian king who was defeated and taken prisoner. He saw his daughter passing, who had been made a slave, and he showed no emotion. Then Psammenitus saw his son led away to execution, and still he showed no emotion. Then he saw one of his domestic and familiar friends brought in among the captives, and only then did Psammenitus show extreme sadness. Why only then? Didn’t he care about his daughter and son? No. When asked, Psammenitus said: “It is … because only this last affliction was to be manifested by tears, the two first far exceeding all manner of expression.” Our sorrow can be so great and intense that we cannot express it.
A second case told by Montaigne is at first sight the same. It is about “a prince of our own nation, who is at Trent and has news there brought him of the death of his elder brother, a brother on whom depended the whole support and honour of his house, and soon after of that of a younger brother, the second hope of his family.” The prince received the news apparently emotionless and cold-hearted. However, when a few days later one of his servants died, the prince was overcome with sorrow to that extent that “that some thence were forward to conclude that he was only touched to the quick by this last stroke of fortune”. However, “in truth, it was, that being before brimful of grief, the least addition overflowed the bounds of all patience.” Sorrow can become more than we can bear.
We can become petrified with sorrow, as these and other examples by Montaigne show. And just this is the deepest, the strongest sorrow. Quoting Petrarca, Montaigne tells us that those who can tell us how much they suffer, actually don’t suffer very much. However, as Montaigne also shows in this essay, sorrow is not too different from joy. They are the opposite poles of the same emotions and in that respect they are the same. Actually, pure emotions don’t exist, so Montaigne tells us in his essay “That we taste nothing pure” (Book II, 20). Both our sorrows and our joys, both our negative experiences and our positive experiences are mixed and contain at least a bit of the opposite. “Of the pleasure and goods that we enjoy, there is not one exempt from some mixture of ill and inconvenience”, as he says there, which he illustrates with a quotation from Lucretius: “From the very fountain of our pleasure, something rises that is bitter, which even in flowers destroys”. “Our extremest pleasure has some sort of groaning and complaining in it…”. Montaigne would certainly agree with the opposite, since it follows from what he writes in both essays discussed here. Death often means the end of suffering. A soldier who has fallen has contributed to saving his country. In his essay “That we taste nothing pure” Montaigne tells us that the “confusion” between joy and sadness can be seen well, when painters hold, “that the same motions and grimaces of the face that serve for weeping; serve for laughter too”. This is actually an exemplification of the fact that both pure delight and pure sorrow do not exist. Besides this, expressions of joy are often not too different from expressions of sorrow. We don’t know what to say when an extreme happiness overcomes us.
And Montaigne himself? Sadness of the death of his dear friend Étienne de La Boétie is in the background of his essays and sometimes it comes to the surface. It is also the background of his life. But as we see in Book III of the Essays, in the end gradually the sadness fades away, although it never becomes zero. The good memories remain, but sorrow is seldom eternal in the sense that it remains to dominate life. As such, Montaigne has never been very subject to violent emotions, he says. “I am naturally of a stubborn apprehension, which also, by reasoning, I every day harden and fortify.” After a difficult time, we often come back stronger.