Excerpts: “Both ancients and moderns did share a sense of the tragic. Both accepted that there are some losses that are irremediable; some experiences from which we cannot fully recover; some scars that heal but do not fade. The challenge of consolation in our times is to endure tragedy, even when we cannot find a meaning for it, and continue living in hope” (p. 4).
“When we seek consolation, we are seeking more than just a way to feel better. Serious losses cause us to question the larger design of our existence: the fact that time flows inexorably in one direction, and that while we can still hope for the future we cannot unlive the past. Serious reversals cause us to reckon with the fact that the world is not fair and that, in the larger domain of politics and the smaller world of our private lives, justice can remain cruelly out of reach. To be consoled is to make peace with the order of the world without renouncing our hopes for justice” (p. 7).
“The worst of despair, as they know only too well, is to feel alone. The consolation they offer is the certainty that others have felt exactly as we have done and that we are not alone, in our rage and despair, and our longing for better days” (p. 20-21).
“It is their extraordinary capacity to give words to our own doubts, our maddening sense of the inscrutability of the world, the absence of justice, the cruelty of fate, and our longing for a world where our experience finds validation and meaning. The very fact that they have been saved across thousand of years, recited, copied out rescued from flames, affirms that we are not alone in our search to give meaning to the world and to our existence. We do not have to believe in God to believe this, but we do need faith in human beings and the chain of meanings we have inherited” (p. 23).
“It was time to stop measuring life by success at public rituals in the eyes of the court, the hangers-on, the barbarian chiefs. For this was the trap of a life lived as a performance; you forgot whom the play was for” (p. 63).
“To this day we wonder how Romans managed to comprehend the unwinding of their world. At times it proceeded so slowly they could not see it; at other times when change engulfed single lifetimes, it must have seemed apocalyptic. At all times, but especially when history no longer seems comprehensible, people cling to illusions of continuity, particularly those manufactured by their rulers” (p. 70).
“What the painting helps us to understand is that the recurrent subject of consolation is time itself–the fact that it goes one way and cannot be stopped, cannot be slowed down, cannot be reversed; that our losses cannot be made good; that the future is unknowable, the past is irrecoverable, and time for us ends in death, while it goes on for others as if we never existed” (p. 91-92).
“We need human society in order to escape ourselves, to see ourselves as others do, to compare our understanding with theirs, to share a common world of feeling. What gives consolation, Hume concluded, is the social world: its games, rituals, honors, and rewards” (p. 111-112).
“To own failure was to stop pretending that the person responsible was a discarded self and to accept that this person was always and eternally you. To accept this failed self was to stop pushing your shame away. This was what it truly took to ‘live in truth’” (p. 238).
Ignatieff, Michael (2021). On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times. New York: Macmillan Publishing Group LLC.