QUE SERA, SERA

“Anger would inflict punishment on another; meanwhile it tortures itself.”
-- Publilius Syrus, “Moral Sayings,” 1st Century B.C.

I’ve been told I’m a contentious smart ass (see photo).

Much of my long history of contentiousness was closely related to my being a type-A control-freak. I use the past tense, “was,” because dealing with serious illness inevitably requires ceding control to others, whether we like it or not. While it’s true that control-freaks typically exhibit an air of bravado and confidence, it’s also true that these qualities almost always belie deep-seated insecurities that, while not insurmountable, can be managed by self help strategies: like avoiding starving yourself, not drinking on an empty stomach, and getting plenty of healthy sleep. Where am I headed with this? I don’t know, but let’s see. One symptom of control-freak syndrome I’ve noticed in myself, and others, is anger.

With that in mind, today’s question is this: when is anger an appropriate human response, or defense mechanism, if ever?

Notwithstanding Publilius’ sage advice, Malcolm X has a point in saying, “Usually, when people are sad, they don’t do anything, they just cry over their condition. But when they get angry they bring about change”(“Malcolm X Speaks,” 1965). I suppose MX is right, in social relationships, private and public, anger has affected more positive change than sadness. The implication is that sadness is a passive state and anger active. But what of the smoldering anger divorced from action. Is this healthy? Does this not produce stress? And isn’t stress that dreaded thing that breeds sickness and misery?

Perhaps, but I like to think stress, happiness, contentment, anger, desire, all those things that make us human, are not what ultimately prove our undoing. Angry people survive, and the contented die. But we like to think that terms like attitude (Western) and karma (Eastern) can really affect fate’s outcomes. Maybe fate is genetic? And maybe states of mind are like dreams. We like to think they have some bearing on what is, but what is, is, and wishful thoughts, dreams, and attitudes have no bearing on the nature of things.

“The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them” (Jean Cocteau, “Les Enfants Terribles,” 1929).

As Oscar Wilde would have it, “One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be” (“De Profundis,” 1905). But for every Oscar Wilde there’s a Henry Miller, “We talk about fate as if it were something visited upon us; we forget that we create our fate every day we live.” Perhaps Henry, but Edward Dahlberg’s stoic council that “We are ruled by chance but never have enough patience to accept its despotism” makes more sense to me (“Reasons of the Heart,” 1965).

But is there a middle ground between fate and choice? Can the winds of reason shape the randomness of happenstance? Can the existential dread of ceasing to be, be overcome by faith in the illusion that we shape our circumstances? Much as Camus saw Sisyphus as happy in that downhill trudge towards his inescapable task, E. M. Forster saw a glimmer of hope in the star’s rule: “Failure or success seems to have been allotted to men by the stars. But they retain the power of wriggling, of fighting with their star or against it, and in the whole universe the only really interesting movement is this wriggle” (“Abinger Harvest,” 1936).


And what of this “wriggle?” Does this “wriggle” refer to work, contemplation, or fun? And how to we reconcile this with Wilde’s contention that, “To do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world, the most difficult and the most intellectual” (“Intentions,” 1891). And how would Wilde respond to Schopenhauer’s dictum that, “Men need some kind of external activity, because they are inactive within” (“Parerga and Paralipomena,” 1851)?


As you can see, the “anger” question generated intractable philosophical questions as old as history: how do fate, determinism, and autonomy figure into the way we live?

“Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave let him know he has enough” (Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass,” 1855-92).

“No never forget!…Never forget any moment; they are too few”
-- Elizabeth Bowen, “To the North,” 1932