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The Wound and the Bow
|
Edmund Wilson |
Sometimes you have a wound that never heals. That was the
story of the Greek warrior Philoctetes who was exiled to the island of Lemnos
due to a suppurating laceration that also smelled. There was the wound and the
additional insult resulting from being ostracized and made into a pariah by his
peers. Loss of any kind is such a wound, whether it's unreciprocated
love, unfulfilled ambition or the death of a loved one. At first you're surrounded with family and friends who console you. Jews sit shiva and Catholics have wakes, but the purpose is not only to
remember the dead. It’s to help the living go on. However, after it’s all over the
person in mourning always comes back to the empty house or apartment, one of
those dirty brick pre-war affairs one imagines the Glass family occupying in Franny and Zooey—with a window
overlooking an aging water tower and stamped with a built-in solitude. There's no person or thing that can replace loss. It just sits there
and then life takes its course and the pain turns into memory that is
ultimately distorted by some degree of denigration or idealization depending on
the compromise formation that occurs in the psyche of the mourner. The pain
never goes away, though there are people for whom it becomes a kind of fuel as
Edmund Wilson describes in his famous series of essays, The Wound and the Bow, based on the Philoctetes myth. Others succumb and eventually drown in their sorrows.
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