Immedicable Sorrow

This is from Under the Volcano, which i am reading now (incredibly) for the first time. I actually wanted to post this on my wall at farcebook but couldn’t figure out how to do it! I just wanted really to counterbalance the endemic cheerfulness there. I guess people don’t haunt the halls of farcebook in search of gloom; no, they want a way to spend time at work a little less painfully. If they wanted tragedy they’d go home, or look up from their screens, or navigate elsewhere.

The thing is, not all our sorrows are medicable. This is an obvious observation but it seems that fewer and fewer people share it. One thing writing can do is remind us of what was once obvious but no longer is. If enough time goes by without stating something, it becomes obscure and disappears. NOT ALL SORROWS ARE MEDICABLE. Alcoholism, for one, has a single cure, and it ain’t a pill, and it ain’t a cure. The condition of living is incurable. As Beckett said, “We are born astride a grave.”

from Under the Volcano, by Malcom Lowry

  

“The merry grinding of the roller skates, the cheerful if ironic music, the cries of the little children on their goose-necked steeds, the procession of queer pictures—all this had suddenly become transcendently awful and tragic, distant, transmuted, as it were some final impression on the senses of what the earth was like, carried over into an obscure region of death, a gathering thunder of immedicable sorrow; the consul needed a drink….”