Yes, time can be a spiral, as Cream pointed out in her comment on my last. But it can seem like a circle of recurrence too, as the season evokes emotions long past.
I’ve been wanting to write of life’s pathos for weeks now, but today it caught up with me, with an inescapable twisting of the guts. Everyone I saw in town carried its lineaments, or perhaps I should say they were the unwitting mirrors of my own feeling.
Every Christmas bears with it the ghosts of our Christmasses past, as in Dickens’ novella, A Christmas Carol. Today I recalled 1954. Since six years old, I’d been boarding at a prep school but all that had suddenly changed and I was 12. I’d just acquired a new stepfather, the previous stepfather having been discarded in a nasty divorce. We went to live far away, where I knew no one. At Christmas I had to buy some presents and the only realistic choice was to get cheap things at Woolworths. This particular store, in that town, was pathetic even before you entered its swing doors. A red-faced man used to stand outside all day, selling matches from a tray strapped to his chest. He stood on wooden stumps about eight inches in diameter. They were too short for a man his size, but he could shift fast enough when he left his pitch, which was on the pavement between Woolworths and a pets’ meat shop. All the meat in there was dyed deep green, to make sure it did not get sold as normal meat for humans, for it was “condemned”. I used to wonder what was wrong with it, and whether some poor people would merely pretend they had a dog, so as to buy it for themselves.
In Woolworths I desperately tried to buy non-pathetic gifts but my budget made this impossible. I knew that whatever I bought would be received with fake appreciation: six violet-scented bath cubes, a lady’s handkerchief with an embroidered rose, a gentleman’s handkerchief with dark-blue stripes on the edge. And what to get for my young half-sister? I have hated shopping ever since. Sometimes I have determinedly made my own Christmas cards. At least I didn’t usually think they were pathetic. Or I have made presents too, or chosen them with infinite care, sometimes to discover that they were not to the recipient’s taste.
These things don’t bother me any more, or so I thought, but today I was overcome with those memories—and others like them, mostly about poverty, and trying to keep up appearances. There is nothing pretentious about the town where I live now. It doesn’t have a single fashionable street or sophisticated shop. The people out shopping were nobodies like me: perhaps this is why I like living here. Today, I felt sorry for almost everyone I saw—I won’t try and provoke you with sentimental details, like those in Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the Little Match Girl. Oh yes, sentimentality sells matches, or used to, but it’s not my point at all.
On my trip to town this morning, I encountered only one person who seemed to escape being pathetic. He was a gentleman advancing down the street, his hair copious and snowy white, his necktie tasteful, his long overcoat solemn and immaculate. He took no interest in the street scene. He appeared wealthy and self-satisfied.
Aha! Suddenly I see the purpose of wealth and self-satisfaction: to adorn the bearer with an aegis or mantle which renders him impervious to pathos. He wants to be envied, not pitied. That’s his motivation, and I’ve never understood it. Never has it worked for me. Pathos is life. Life is pathos. I’d sooner be a Buddhist than a rich man, but I am glad to be neither. There is suffering in the world and I am not above it or beyond it.
a wayfarer’s notes 
one of your most beautiful and memorable posts!
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christmas is an amplifier. it makes greater that which we experience. it sensitizes us to each other in ways that we barely recognise at other times. My memories of Christmases are varied and run from the ecstatic to the pathetic. much like the rest of my memories……..
i don`t think that the wealthy are impervious to pathos any more than the flat broke. I’ve met some stone-hearted beggars in my time.
seeing past the ironic and becoming determined to make this Christmas different is a way to beat back the pathos, if you choose to, and make way for something joyful and shared.
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Thanks for your input Alistair. The mood of sadness cleared like mist heralding a sunny day. I'm not determined to make Christmas anything, for I see my life as tuning and participating rather than creating from will.
Pathos is closely connected with vulnerability, and it seems to me that to desire wealth and self-satisfaction is to desire invulnerability, which ultimately goes against nature and prevents us from fully tuning with the universe.
Pathos is the subjective feeling provoked by observing vulnerability in all creatures including myself. It was harder to observe it in those who claim to have conquered it.
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well, you sent me to the dictionary on this one, Vincent! I've always thought of pathos as a condescending emotion lavished on the less able (where did I get that? – but here, pathetic has a distinctly negative edge, and pathos partakes of that negativity.) I see though that it has a range beyond what I thought.
….PITY implies tender or sometimes slightly contemptuous sorrow for one in misery or distress “felt pity for the captives”. COMPASSION implies pity coupled with an urgent desire to aid or to spare ….
it is the contemptuous sorrow that I've always associated with pathos and recoiled from.
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Vincent,
What a beautiful post. It has inspired so much emotion, and so much thought both personally of Christmas past, and of Christmas present. And as I ponder wealth, I realize even more acutely, having been on both sides of it at varying points, that it isn't money or the lack thereof but rather where we choose to focus our vision. Had I been a member of your family, your handmade gifts as a child would have meant more to me than anything I might have ever received from a store. Your spending so carefully of the little you had on presents chosen at the store would have swelled my heart beyond words. Because to me, the true gift is of your heart, the Love and care and thought behind the items. The gift is not the thing…the gift is You, Your Love.
The gifts I cherish the most are the gifts that came from the heart. As just one small example…my nephew when he was about 7 or so, saved up his own money to buy me a ring, an imitation emerald ring. He was so proud to present this to me on Christmas Day. I still have that ring years later, I still remember it so vividly amidst all of the other gifts, and I still remember the look on his face when he gave it to me. He wasn't giving me a ring. He was giving me Love. To me, THAT is the gift. That ring is more precious than the purest emerald in the world, and no price could ever be placed on such a gift.
Peace be with you this holiday season, and always. Thank you for this lovely post and for sharing so generously of your heart. It is a treasure and a blessing for my holiday season.
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my youngest boy made me a tie for father
s day last year.......out of cardboard. i found it as i was going through some stuff in my new apartment. i will put it on my fridge this evening as a reminder of his love for his dad.<br />Vincent, i have just been separated from the mother of my children and if i sit passive to my emotions they will well up and consume me as they have so many times in the past,to the point where i am unable to function.<br />wealthy or poor? its not about that for me.it`s about finding the joy in all that we are presented with and if it is difficult to find the joy…….then just keep looking.
we must be ambassadors for hope in this world. we are the few who dare to speak.
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The way I was brought up, handmade gifts could never be tokens like cardboard ties. They had to compete, as it were, with the real thing. So I made my grandfather a pipe rack in my school carpentry class, and stuck on a picture from the National Geographic Magazine of some grizzled tribesman smoking a handmade pipe. He liked it very much. Later I learned, with a little help from amateurs, to make more advanced thing, e.g. from perspex; or leather with gold leaf applied. Certain projects were my idea but quite agonising to execute because they were too advanced for my undeveloped skills and inadequate tools. My standards were far higher than my capabilities.
It's easy to look back now and see that this child just wanted simple affection, without the pressure to try and buy it with skilled performance, whether in shopping or making.
It's taken a lot of living to be able to find the warmth and love that I so fruitlessly craved for as a child; and realise that what we can or cannot do does not matter.
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As a child and after, I was sensitive to being humiliated. Nowadays I feel secure, by reason of wisdom, love and old age—which allows you to be outrageous and get away with it.
Wealth always seemed to offer a kind of invulnerability, I intuitively rejected it as any solution, even though poverty was part of the cause of humiliation. Now I know it was because “money can't buy me love”.
So I went on a spiritual quest, to find the “love inside”.
But I am still sensitive to signs of humiliation – in others. Sensitivity to the world, in my view, is the true wealth, for when we don't close ourselves off from it, the whole world is our home, and all the creatures within it are our family. Who needs a palace?
The most common symbol of closing oneself off from the world—possessing power without sensitivity—is the motor-car.
What a good thing for the world, that the oil will soon run out!
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Reblogged this on a wayfarer’s notes and commented:
Recalling a long-ago Christmas, when I was 12. 1954 on the Isle of Wight; recalled in High Wycombe in 2006.
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