Giving Up (6 of 7)

(This is the sixth crumb in a series. Start from the beginning of the series.)

In the previous crumb, I wrote about the vanishing of human agency as we enter the New Testament, and the emergence of a world in which there seems to be no will but the will of God. There is something I dislike like about this movement, something deeply depressing. In a world so perfectly controlled, why bother to do anything, or even to want anything? But I also know this: like anyone, I at times want to change myself—because I keep doing something I regret, or because I feel something I wish I did not feel—and I have tried to make myself change by an act of will, and I have tried kneeling on the floor and asking for help, never mind Who might be listening; and what I have found is that the latter is usually the better approach.

Inasmuch as a story about the absolute agency of God is an invitation to give up our sense of control over our own lives, it is powerful medicine. This loss of agency, which seems to imply imprisonment, in fact frees us. And what it frees us from is not, as logic would imply, a sense of moral responsibility but rather the compulsion to make sense of our lives, to know precisely what they mean. When a person kneels down in wild surrender, and says, “I’m a hopeless sinner!” they do not mean, “It’s not my fault,” nor do they mean, “I’m going to stop trying to do right.” What they mean is that their intentions have come unhooked from outcomes. They still intend, but no longer with an expectation of success—and yet, not without hope, but with a new kind of hope, a hope that is not burdened with practical considerations but leaps past the practical to the sublime; a desire that does not bury its fire in schemes to attain its object, but burns purely and brightly in its elemental desiring. The result of this is lightheartedness.

This is why, in The Brothers Karamazov, the recognition that one is guilty for everything, before everyone, is always accompanied by a sudden capacity to perceive the beauty of the world and by an overwhelming joy. Growing up, I used to hear so much about guilt—about Jewish guilt and Christian guilt. It was not until I read The Brothers Karamazov that I understood that guilt could be precisely the opposite of what I had thought. I had understood it always as burdensome and neurotic, a hot, constricted, teeth-gnashing state of mind (the feeling of guilt). But immediately on reading Father Zosima’s story, I saw how the acceptance of one’s endless errors (the fact of guilt) was really the means of escape from that teeth-gnashing mood: because the teeth-gnashing came not from the desire to be perfect nor from the knowledge of one’s imperfections but from the mad belief that one could, by one’s own powers, attain perfection.

When a character in The Brothers K experiences this guilt/surrender/joy, he invariably falls on the floor and begins to weep. This is appropriate, because tears, even more than laughter, are a sign of lightheartedness (perhaps I should say ‘openheartedness,’ but I’m not sure I want to draw the distinction). It is when we cannot cry that our hearts are closed and constricted, and we are unable to perceive the world properly, for, like little Kay in Hans Christien Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” we have in our eyes a shard of the evil mirror that the wicked spirit made, in which everything appears ugly. And this is why, at the end of “The Snow Queen,” it is Kay’s tears—brought on by Gerda’s tears—that wash the shard of mirror from his eye. For it is in tears that we escape from the prisons we have made ourselves.

Before the shard is washed from his eye, Kay is in a state of mind that I recognize well:

Little Kay was quite blue with cold, indeed almost black, but he did not feel it; for the Snow Queen had kissed away the icy shiverings, and his heart was already a lump of ice. He dragged some sharp, flat pieces of ice to and fro, and placed them together in all kinds of positions, as if he wished to make something out of them; just as we try to form various figures with little tablets of wood which we call “a Chinese puzzle.” Kay’s fingers were very artistic; it was the icy game of reason at which he played, and in his eyes the figures were very remarkable, and of the highest importance; this opinion was owing to the piece of glass still sticking in his eye. He composed many complete figures, forming different words, but there was one word he never could manage to form, although he wished it very much. It was the word “Eternity.” The Snow Queen had said to him, “When you can find out this, you shall be your own master, and I will give you the whole world and a new pair of skates.” But he could not accomplish it.

Is this not a beautiful description of the mood of control and painful exertion towards ends that are either unattainable or meaningless (now one, now the other) in which we so often find ourselves? Note the tremendous symbolical compression here, how the whole ambition and failure of the rationalist project is captured in a few sentences: it can form every word but the one it wishes to form, the one that matters.

Presently, Gerta arrives, sees Kay sitting there, runs to him, and, finding him cold and unyielding, begins to cry; the tears fall on his breast and melt “the lump of ice” around his heart:

Then Kay burst into tears, and he wept so that the splinter of glass swam out of his eye. Then he recognized Gerda, and said, joyfully, “Gerda, dear little Gerda, where have you been all this time, and where have I been?” And he looked all around him, and said, “How cold it is, and how large and empty it all looks,” and he clung to Gerda, and she laughed and wept for joy. It was so pleasing to see them that the pieces of ice even danced about; and when they were tired and went to lie down, they formed themselves into the letters of the word which the Snow Queen had said he must find out before he could be his own master, and have the whole world and a pair of new skates. …The Snow Queen might come home now when she pleased, for there stood his certainty of freedom, in the word she wanted, written in shining letters of ice.

This too is exactly right: when we give up our ambition to attain eternity/infinity through reason and control, then it comes back to us as gift. The year before “The Snow Queen” was first published, another Danish author wrote a very different sort of book that treats a strikingly similar theme. “Only in infinite resignation does an individual become conscious of his eternal validity,” writes Kierkegaard, in Fear and Trembling. What Kierkegaard speaks of here is a giving up of all hope of attaining one’s desires—and yet, he tells us, beyond this resignation lies something else (which he calls "faith"), whereby we can get back everything we have given up “by the power of the absurd.” Presumably, icicles dancing with joy, getting tired, and lying down in the shape of a word counts as “the power of the absurd.”