Between despair and strength

Angel of Grief, by William Wetmore Story (1894)

Or perhaps it is only a case of "zwischen Eifer und Einwand" (between enthusiasm and objection), as my friend Felicitas Hoppe expresses it in Verbrecher und Versager.

Strength is what I feel when I am at my work, with the result an essay, a review, a revision of the book I am writing. Sometimes even cooking does it for me. When I am not buoyed up by that sense of strength, in creeps that negative thing. Despair is probably hyperbole, since I am not a natural depressive, and the thought of suicide is not something that comes naturally to me. If I were dead, I would never again be able to read, to fill my mind, to write again. Intellectual activity brings me joy.  It is not surprising that I am a scholar of the Enlightenment, not of the Romantic period: my heart has never leapt to behold a rainbow in the sky. I admire the beauty, the order, and the like, all of which, especially after Rick's death, kept my mind active.

It is really sadness, a low-grade manifestation of despair, but when it arrives it is consuming. It is going on four years now that my darling husband died, and yet, in a nonce, sadness seems literally to invade me. It is said that one can die of a broken heart, and mine certainly suffered a blow.

From Descartes' De homine (1694)

It was the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) who first clarified the structure and functions of the heart. On the Circulation of the Blood (1628) not only described the systematic circulation and properties of blood being pumped around the body by the heart, but it also offered powerful support for the notion that the human body was a mechanism, like a clock or like the universe. Descartes (1596–1650), a brilliant contemporary who promoted Harvey's ideas on the circulation of the blood, compared the heart to a combustion engine or a pump. The heart's status was beginning to change.

It was human reason, according to the 18th-century philosophes, that had enabled us to penetrate the laws regulating the natural world. Between Galileo (1564–1642) and Newton, even the earth lost its privileged position in the universe. The body, like the universe, was subject to regular laws; it was the task of the scientist to discover them. In the Age of Reason, emotions and passions were seen as potentially irrational, and it was seriously thought that rational men could control their influence. Aristotle had believed something similar, using the term "acrasia" (from which the English word "crazy" derives) to refer to people who made bad choices even when they knew they were wrong. By the nineteenth century, J. S. Mill claimed that the highest pleasures are those given "by the operations of the intellect and of the feelings as they blend with the intellect."

A rheumatic heart

The life of the mind, however, is a very self-centered, solitary activity. The operative pronoun is "I." In The Symposium, in which Socrates has the last word, the highest stage of love is one of self-centered intellection.

My life with Rick involved much intellectual activity, but that was only one aspect of our shared life. The heart played a greater role, and it continues to suffer.

Picture credits: Glasgow University Library; Frank Edwin