...Before the pandemic, when I taught my students about Sisyphus's suffering, the lesson elicited awkward giggles and blank stares. They just didn't understand how suffering might matter. I asked them how they could lead lives of lasting significance, given that their efforts would eventually be rolled over by an indifferent world. How can we live only to suffer and die? How should we take up suffering? Today, students don't laugh at these questions. They stare at me like a class of eyewitnesses. Lately, many of them have experienced suffering in the form of physical and emotional pain, boredom, and continual frustration. Bloom speaks directly to such a reader and suggests that one's orientation to suffering, rather than its total mitigation, is central to a fulfilling life. Many of the most valuable events in life—falling in love, getting married, having kids, being moral—are at certain points excruciatingly difficult or rather simply excruciating. And this, Bloom contends, for better and for worse, is simply our lot if we hope to live meaningfully.
Perhaps you want to be free of suffering. Perhaps you often desire the wrong things. I certainly do. Bloom's modest yet compelling book echoes a sentiment expressed by American novelist David Foster Wallace: "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty unsexy ways, every day." In other words, one is free to take up suffering, to own it, and to make it worthwhile. It is only when Sisyphus can own up to his boulder, claim it entirely, that, as Albert Camus once said, we might imagine him as truly happy. I am grateful to Bloom for explaining, once again, why it isn't so bad to be long suffering.
John Kaag
https://t.co/MyUGJvqnSM
(https://twitter.com/TheAmScho/status/1464640375549833220?s=02)
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