I’m writing this on a very funny day. It was a funny day at work, and a funny day on the train back, with lots of weird, awkward interactions throughout. Some days are just like this, I suppose. Not much can be done about them.
My partner was recently talking to me about a novel she was reading, called The Pretender, by Jo Harkin. The novel is set in 15th-century England, and is a fictionalized account of Lambert Simnel, a young boy who became the figurehead of a Yorkist rebellion during the War of the Roses and thus became a pretender heir to the throne.
One point that she mentioned was about Boethius' The Consolation of Philosophy, which plays a role in the novel. Apparently, Simnel reads the book and is disgusted by Lady Philosophy. In particular, what is so disgusting is that Lady Philosophy only seems to care about the rich and the wealthy.
My partner described the book’s reasoning like so: Fortune (who Boethius also anthropomorphizes as a Lady) swings back and forth like a pendulum, one that is uncontrollable. Sometimes, one gets lucky; sometimes, ones does not. But what about a poor farm girl who never experiences any joy or happiness, works all her life, and then is raped and murdered by a passing knight?
Boethius claims that all those wrongdoers surely get their commeuppance, like so: “And it is because you don’t know the end and purpose of things that you think the wicked and the criminal have power and happiness.” But is there any such purpose to the poor, dead farm girl?
The answer I foolishly gave, initially, was that the equilibrium of death is a return to general order. I realize now that it’s not a great argument, especially if one has any ill-feelings towards their own death (which is basically everyone). At the same time, does the farm girl not have any beauty in her life at any point? If you look at any life, most of the time, there is at least some happiness to be found, even if it is not in the same capacity as what we would consider to be ‘modern happiness’. If someone grows up in constant misery and meets a terrible end, if, to use Boethius’ metaphor, Lady Fortune has permanently smited this person, then we should mourn the tragedy of what their life was. I don’t think it would apply to most, though, even at the time of Boethius’ writing. It feels almost insulting to those people to think that the masses automatically held miserable lives.
“But,” the cynic in me may say, “what about the children?” It is true that roughly half of all children died before the age of puberty, until that figure dropped off within the last two centuries. These are obviously terribly tragic figures. But even still, I’d struggle to see how there’d be no happiness within the child’s life. Surely, hedonic adaptation applies here.
But then, what do I know? I guess all I really do know is that I’m quite happy to live in the time that I do.
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