This blog is about applying the lessons of history to our daily lives. But don’t be fooled, History is not an academic pursuit-it’s what every single one of you is doing right now!! This Blog will, I assure you, get personal, wet, sticky and challenging to the ideas you hold most dear. So you can relax, there will be no quizzes, and there will be swear words and jokes and stuff.
But I will not lie to you, or pull the punches of what our ancestors have learned.
If you feel I am wrong about something, let me know with a polite argument.
I am not seeking to prove myself right, but to find out what is right.
And, obverse-ly in the words of Oliver Cromwell, “I beseech you Gentlemen, by the bowels of Christ, to consider that you might be wrong.”
“Man does not love society as much as he fears solitude.”
P21, Our Oriental Heritage, Will and Ariel Durant.
As an Macro-Historical principle, the above statement gives us insight to certain social truths, but little forward action; it is it’s own discovery and therein a cul-de-sac of thought leading only to itself. However, when applied to the personal, daily lives of men and women, it becomes almost a geometric Axiom; a law that we cannot escape. But by acceptance and forethought, we can limit it’s painful side.
And pain, love, joy and compassion and all those vague necessaries are what life is all about.
Don’t let the academic nature of that first paragraph bother you too much.
‘Cuz the rest of this is going to be about the broken hearted, and the loss of love.
The above Historical principle is Will and Ariel Durant’s mathematical word formula which objectively describes the sum total all the horrible things we do to ourselves to just prevent our- selves from being alone. We cannot live alone, but other people are so weird. And other people think I’m weird. Sometimes we pick the wrong solution to our lonliness, and when the mistake must be rectified, we are twice as alone as before, and twice as fearful
The fear of solitude, the terror of being alone in an empty apartment with the growing suspicion that nobody likes you, or ever did or ever will. You may take comfort in the truth that our species has carried these feelings since the burden of consciousness first bloomed in our skulls.
But so what, Montaigne? What’s this going to do for me and that bastard/bitch who hurt me, or won’t return my calls? How will it help ease the pain of being turned away, of having to learn how to forget those intimacies you’ve created with this other soul, who now must be a stranger?
Dang, calm down Tom Waits.
Though loneliness can be existential, History isn’t so all you Satre Jr’. are on your own. Let us stick to the classic modern loneliness from breaking up.
Here’s what History teaches us about heartbreak.
The first lesson of history is to drink profusely. Yep. That’s right. Get real drunk.
Since bread, there has been beer. And since beer, there has been weeping in it. But it was not until 325BC, in the Greek port of Cos where the Official rules of breakup drinking where established:
1. Go with two friends. One will not be enough.
2. Go to a bar you do not regularly frequent, for you will likely be thrown out and asked not to return.
3. Yes, that woman who looks like a man is a man.
4. Do not communicate at all, in any way, with the ex during the drinking binge.
Other rules are added and subtracted with the flow of the lava lamp of time. But those are the basics.
After the drinking is done, history begins to splinter a bit on the next best course to heal a broken heart; Shakespeare wrote sonnets, Ivan III liked to cut off heads and beat people with knotted ropes. But the social scientists here at Cromwell’s Ghost Laboratories have distilled centuries of experience into a few the basic categories. They are: Replacing the lost love, Burying oneself in work, Finding new hobbies, New clothes, New haircut New stuff. And these catagories are all fairly standard though time and space.
These however are just coping mechanisms. Mummer’s plays and magic lantern shows we put on to cover battle within; the fear of being alone-or worse, the fear of deserving to be alone.
The only real solace to this pain is the oxymoronic truth that if you have feeling enough to suffer from the loss, then you are a good person. Jerks, scumbags, bitches and assholes don’t mind losing what they can never really have. And even though it may feel like all things sweet, good and true were taken from you with the loss of the other’s face from your life, you are a good person, and more good things will come again to you, as the old pleasures will soon lose the taint of your ‘other’, and become only yours again. But, unfortunately, no matter what you do to cope or hide, you will be in pain and it won’t go away quick.
But that’s okay, because History is here for you, and so am I.
“Man does not love society as much as he fears solitude.”
You will get over this, because you have to.
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