The Bliss and Mystery of Human Misery: An Open Conclusion

by Arnold De Villa
March 16, 2013
“Les Miserable” has been on the radar for quite a time, not only because of the many awards it has recently gained, but also because it is truly a classic worth revisiting. Anyone who saw the movie or read the book could easily recognize that the three articles I wrote before this was a poor attempt to duplicate the genius of Victor Hugo. I decided to end it with an open letter, supposedly a public confession of “Fantine’s” misery. To avoid flagrant plagiarism, I had to rename the characters, twist the events and infuse something of my own. But Victory Hugo cannot be cloned. He occupies a unique pedestal in his own literary time.
Human misery is without end. It comes in various forms, at any time, and in any unexpected or predicted moment. As life is a mystery, so is misery. Its facets and phases of pain, sorrow, failure, illness, death and betrayal are all beyond reason; perhaps because they escape reason or maybe because they are merely incompatible with reason. When Descartes declared his existential cliché of “I think, therefore I am”, somewhere in another part of a less privileged sector must have also cried out a whimper of “I live, therefore I grieve”.
Unlike dichotomies of night and day, good and evil, right and wrong, misery stands alone. It is a human condition that theologians claim as a consequence of sin. Sociologists might categorize it as an imperfection of human interaction. Politicians could call it social injustice and convert it into a tool for their campaign. And economists could assert that misery is due to human greed, a loophole within capitalistic principles.
Having been jailed for 19 years and being terminated from employment are seemingly regular occurrences; but not when the cause of jail time is for stealing a loaf of bread and the reason for losing employment is for supporting a child growing up with foster parents. Throw in a love triangle in the plot; inject some idealistic revolutionists, a saintly cleric, and a character with a stubborn sense of upholding the law. The chemistry concocts a tear jerking experience. Such is “Les Miserable”, the movie. “Les Miserable”, the book goes further. It adds the historical intricacies of character situations entwined in a huge pot of drama and interlaced interaction, a genre that is becoming scarcer as our attention span is bullied out by the fast paced motion of information and digital media.
As the movie ended and the audience left with soggy eyes, applause filled the hall. Really, do we enjoy being tortured into tears? What is it in human pain that moves us? What are the elements of tragedy that anchors our attention into that singular dimension of pure attention? And why the tears? Why the admiration?
This is where my contention of bliss comes in. The bliss of misery is upon the grounds of human mystery, the space that no longer allows us to debate or to discuss, therefore leaving us with no other option but to accept and to submit.
When we can no longer resist or refuse, refute or rebel, reason out or create alibis, we would easily clamor for deliverance, cry for help, and seek to have our hopes responded to. We will do anything for help. But then it does not come. We plunge ourselves into a hole of despondent self-pity, an intrinsic pain that gnaws against our diurnal motions. We feel alone, hapless, cursed by the unexpected tides of a life we did not seek. Sooner or later, we are gulping Tricyclics or Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors.
But then, after that steep decline, after an optimal experience of human limitation, after a first- hand ride atop the roller coaster of agony and pain, if we survive, when we survive, it seems that life will lead us to another level of existence. And since we are bereft of any rational explanations, the reality of simply accepting and submitting becomes a liberating event and not a suffocating moment.
Assuming for a moment that the idea of hope is not even an option, the mere fact that humanity is limited is evidence that pain is limited and that misery is not eternity. And assuming for a moment that we do not believe in the after-life or after-death, depending on how we perceive it, the other side of life is non-life as the other side of existence is non-existence, both of which expel the notion of suffering since suffering requires existence before it can transpire.
I know. This philosophical mambo jumbo is maybe more suited for text books that no one cares to read. All I intend to say is that there is something good in being limited. It makes all bad things related to it limited as well. And although even the good things related to it will also be limited, we have accepted that fact a long time back. The bliss of misery is the realization that when we have totally nothing left to do, to have or to offer, the layers of pretension and misconceptions are also reduced into nothingness. We are forced to look at our mortalities and forced to make the most out of the limitations we are imposed with. When there are no other options, the only option left is the attitude we adopt as a reaction. And that simple attitude will tend to make all the difference. So the counter-argument is that we will not run dry of options; and that our choice of attitudes will be the ultimate option that we can have.
This is the open conclusion. There is bliss in human misery. It is not the bliss of joy but the bliss of humanity, the bliss that offers us a limited dosage of pain and a limited ration of misery. In that limitation, we realize that we cannot suffice by ourselves. In reaching out and in acknowledging that there are others, the collective limitation of one human being with another creates abundant ripples of human wealth. This wealth is not the monetary remuneration of excess but the abundant and optimal use of scarcity. It is when we have less that we first become wealthy so that we can work to have more and realize that we have nothing.
In “Les Miserable”, the lives of a felon, a single mother, an anonymous lover, an orphaned child and a romantic patriot all fused in a grand collage of plots and subplots, hangers and cliff hangers, depicting the plight of man’s soul, a limited entity that recognized its limitation upon its interaction with another limitation. And for that we all applauded with tears in our eyes that redeem our vision from the false delusions of what human beings are.
Yes, the movie was worth our tears and the book as well, because those tears come in to take away the blocks of ignorance, the curtains of not knowing.