Living in anguish, continuing in hope

MANILA, Philippines - Has it ever occurred to you how lonely devils must be? In the depths, they reside, separated from everything else by layers and layers of accumulated transgressions, shunned by man and banished by the gods, perpetually living in their dark desolation. These creatures, however, are not as alien as you think. From time to time, they take on the identities of common individuals. The truth is that these devils are as human as we are and we, as sinful and lonely as they.

Have you ever considered how these might be those who most need love? Their sinning has indefinitely deprived them of grace, leaving them in a state of indescribable suffering, like that experienced by Maurice and Sarah, the central characters in my favorite book, The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. Consumed and condemned by their adulterous romance, these two lovers are thrown into the chasm of their own internal turmoil, tormented in the same way as those devils in the depths, sinning and suffering like all of us do.

While most would quickly revile the pleasure they have indulged in, the book compels its readers to first understand the pain they are subjected to. In such corrupt state, intimacy becomes isolation. Separated from a society that would rashly give the verdict that their romance is nothing but a petty consummation of their lust, they are condemned never to publicly express their love but only to experience it in desolation, making love to each other as though they are wrestling with both the world and God in the dark.

The romance of Maurice and Sarah is fraught with the pain that outweighs pleasure. In the first portions of the book, the reader would immediately find the narrative suffused with the characters’ anguish; its expression, so subtle yet so powerfully searing.

Some may find it tedious to read an account brimming with bitterness; after all, people secretly crave for that saccharine bliss that comes with fairytale romances. This novel, thankfully, is nothing of the kind. The life it presents is much like our own — broken and imperfect, expressed with a language so raw yet elegant, and so honest.

It is in this book that anguish becomes articulate. Amid the dirge of voices in the narrative, I hear the weeping of my mother who is disappointed with her child and with herself for failing to guide her; I hear the grief of my father who mourns the passing of the years and those who have passed away with them. I hear the sob of every schoolgirl who’s jealous of her first love’s future alongside the lament of every married man who’s jealous of his wife’s past. I hear the cries of all those who knew how to feel, to hurt, and to love. I hear my own pain, sounding in resonance with theirs.

I am reminded of how, in my first experiences of romance, the love I expressed was like the misshapen figure of a clay-child formed with shy hands shaking with the familiar ineptitude of innocence. Its appearance had been so disfigured, so grotesque, so ill with the maladies of jealousy, infidelity, greed, that no one, not even I, could accept it. The thought that I had borne such a love made both it and me despicable. I renamed the imagined child, Hate — for my imperfect, inept, insufficient love for another had been transformed into hatred of myself.

The novel gives voice to that outrage. It expresses it, captures it, and artfully sets it to music. Suddenly, there is beauty to all our suffering — the kind of loveliness sired by anguish, grief, and longing; the kind of magnificence that comes with being human. The novel compels us to understand that we are angry because we are in pain. We suffer, like devils, in the depths — corrupt, lonely, and beaten; we live in sin just as much as we live in grace.  We are those same devils whimpering in the dark, wrestling with our own humanity and its intolerable limitations. We sin because we are not gods — we are insufferably imperfect.

The loftiest assertion of this book, however, is that this imperfection isn’t final. The narrative does not end with Maurice and Sarah’s weakness but rather, in the course of the narrative we see them finally learning and expressing a love more enduring and profound. Sarah learns how to empathize with the pain of her beloved and Maurice discovers how love can persist beyond the end of a relationship and beyond death itself.

Amid the unrelenting torment of deaths and of ends, it is the supreme achievement of the novel to have shown how hope and belief have gradually found their beginnings. What hope it gives when Sarah affirms, “Love doesn’t end when we don’t see each other; people go on loving God, don’t they, all their lives without seeing him?” Such a love then heralds the beginning of belief. It’s like the pages of a book bear witness to the telling of a miracle of a romance so corrupt and grotesque transforming into a love that is pure, lasting and divine.

Throughout the novel, religious undertones steadily grow more palpable. It isn’t an outright teaching of virtue like typical religious accounts. While age-old proverbs from the scriptures may assert that “love is patient, love is kind, love is not jealous,” such verses could speak of only the ideal but never the raw and honest truth. Who among us can attest to love in such a faultless way? Our love, much like us, is not as perfect.

Like Maurice and Sarah, like devils in the depths, we falter, we sin, we fall from grace, but that doesn’t signify that it is what we are; much less that it is all we’ll ever be. It simply means that there is hope that we will change. Did not the writer Dante in the Middle Ages imply that we must go through hell to enter heaven? We, ourselves, are the site of such a journey for at the heart of our corruption is our unbending will to transcend it. Our transformation, when achieved, is in itself our greatest triumph, our conquest against humanity’s anguish and despair, our might rising over depths and ruins, our hope, our very miracle.

THIS WEEK’S WINNER

Pristine Althea L. De Leon is a 19-year-old graduating student of the Ateneo de Manila University, taking up AB Communications and minoring in Literature. She writes for school publication, Matanglawin, and also works for the theater company, Tanghalang Ateneo.