‘We Are Not Alone, and We Never Have Been'

Part one of a two-part conversation with Michael Ignatieff on his beautiful and poignant new book "On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times."

Detail of sarcophagus from the Al-Bass Necropolis of Tyre, second century A.D. Priam pleads with Achilles to give him the body of his slain son Hector. (Photo by Steven Damron, Creative Commons)

By Michael Judge

I launched The First Person just over three months ago because I was dissatisfied with the discourse in today’s media—the way things are too often presented with a political bias or, in some ways worse, an intellectual snobbishness that looks down on the reader and “explains” the way the world really works to us poor slobs who just live and work here. But way back then, on Feb. 1, a thousand news cycles ago, few expected the largest war since Hitler invaded Poland to break out in Europe, or a leaked draft opinion revealing that the U.S. Supreme Court may soon overturn Roe v. Wade. The dreaded news cycle has a way of dragging a journalist back in.

This TFP conversation with the celebrated author, historian, and former Canadian politician, Michael Ignatieff, I’m happy to say, is a return to first principles. Born in Toronto in 1947 to a Canadian-born mother and Russian-born father (the Canadian Rhodes Scholar and diplomat George Ignatieff), Ignatieff was raised in capital cities around the globe and educated at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, and later Oxford, eventually completing his Ph.D. in history at Harvard.

Over a nearly 50-year career, Ignatieff has published 20 books, including The Needs of Strangers (1984), Blood and Belonging (1995), and The Ordinary Virtues (2017), most of which dealt with, what he calls, “a few recurrent themes: human rights and the fate of moral universalism in a world of clashing and competing values; liberalism as a political theory, as a practice and as a way of life; and our struggle to maintain democratic freedoms.”

But his latest book, On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times (2021), has taken him in what he considers “a new direction.” Now in his mid-70s, he’s turned to “thinking about the history of our attempts to console ourselves for the timeless ordeals of life—death, loss and tragedy—and how we manage, despite everything, to live in hope.”

In this time of global pandemics, global warming, the rise of nationalism, refugee crises, and a bloody war in Europe the likes of which hasn’t been seen since World War II, Ignatieff’s “new direction” couldn’t have come at a better time. Our word consolation, he explains, “comes from the Latin consolor, to find solace together.” On Consolation, as Ignatieff writes in the book’s opening pages, “is a collection of portraits, arranged in historical order, each devoted to a single person in extremity who used the traditions they inherited to seek consolation.”

Those portraits include the Bible’s Job and Paul, Cicero, Boethius and Dante, Montaigne, Abraham Lincoln, Gustav Mahler, Anna Akhmatova, Primo Levi, Albert Camus, Václav Havel, and the founder of modern hospice care, Cicely Saunders. “What do we learn that we can use in these times of darkness?” asks Ignatieff. “Something very simple. We are not alone, and we never have been.”

I reach Ignatieff at his home in Vienna on the same day Vladimir Putin’s Russia is celebrating the anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany with lavish festivities, military parades, and more absurd pledges to “de-Nazify” Ukraine. After thanking him for meeting with me, I assure him, as I do all my TFP guests, that this is not a podcast, so he need not worry about “sneezing or swearing” or speaking in soundbites or perfect paragraphs. That’s great, he says, “But I never sneeze and I never swear… and if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

MJ: When I first heard of On Consolation, I thought of a consolation prize. In our hypercompetitive world, we often associate consolation with losing. But, as you say in the book, it “comes from the Latin consolor, to find solace together.” You go on to say that the “essential element of consolation is hope.” I guess my question is, hope in what?

MI: Consolation is connected to hope, I think because it is how we deal with pain, suffering, and reversals of fortune. And the question we’re asking after pain, suffering, and reversals of fortune is how to go on? Can we go on at all? And all I mean by hope is the desire, the belief, that we can go on. That our life is not over. That our situation is not hopeless. That there is something we can do. I don’t mean hope in a transcendental, metaphysical or even a historical sense. I just mean literally the sufficient faith in who we are and where we are that we can carry on. But there’s no doubt, as you said earlier, that the consolation prize is the prize we don’t want to win. And the whole subject of consolation is not something we really want to talk about, because talking about failure, or suffering and loss, is no one’s favorite subject. It’s not mine either. But I’m trying to argue that it’s just an unavoidable part of life. You can’t get through life without consoling yourself, or telling yourself something that enables you to deal with reversals and losses, and enables you to go on. That’s what I mean by hope.

Well, that reminds me of one of my favorite books when I was in college, it was a collection of Samuel Beckett’s works titled I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On. I don’t know if you’ve seen that collection.

Yes. I can’t go on, I must go on … fail, fail better, fail again, fail worse. Beckett knows all about this, right? And the issue is what is it that enables us to fail again and fail better? Nobody wants to talk about this, as you say, because this is a culture given over to success. But everybody has to deal with it. So I wrote the book to kind of restore consolation, which is mostly a religious language, I think, back into secular conversation.

“One of the things I learned writing this book is just how intrinsic to being a human being these questions are. We ask, why the hell did this happen to me? How is it possible that the world is so constructed that my child dies? That I lose my wife? That luck, malign luck, plays such a horrible role in the lives of people around me? How does this happen? And so I don’t want to think of consolation as some kind of preserve of the poets, or philosophers, or the historians. I want to think of it as something that just … is inescapable for all of us.”

You write that with this book you are trying “to show how traditions of consolations forged over thousands of years remain capable of inspiring us today.” What we learn from these traditions, you continue, is something “very simple … We are not alone, and we never have been.”

What I’m trying to say here is that the worst aspect of suffering and loss and the despair that often follows is the feeling of solitude, the feeling that you’re completely alone. That feeling of solitude can often snuff the hope out of you, and I’m trying simply to say, “Look, read this book and you’ll see that people have faced plagues, death, imprisonment, the concentration camp, and have found a way to go on.” And, so, if you read this book, the one emotion that I hope it will give you is that you’re not alone. It’s to break the solitude that I think goes with despair.

It seems to me that those traditions are the traditions that are carried through poetry. I used to say, when I was in journalism school at Columbia decades ago, that the world would be better off if we delivered poems to people’s doorsteps instead of newspapers.

Probably right. Especially if they were Robert Hass or Czesław Miłosz.

Yeah, absolutely. Miłosz is one of my heroes.

If you put a nice Louise Glück poem in there, too, that’s better than The New York Times. No question about it.

Exactly. I think the poem is sort of the vehicle of consolation, going all the way back to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. I’m reminded of a Rilke line: “We’re not comfortably at home in our translated world.” Just by being in this universe, we are suffering—suffering from our cognitive ability to recognize that we’re in this universe. I’m getting off the track very quickly, but …

Actually, I don’t think you are getting off the track. There’s a phrase I’ve come across only after finishing the book. It’s by the German sociologist Georg Simmel who said we suffer about the suffering. That is, we suffer. Then we suffer about the fact that we’re suffering. We both experience it from inside—loss, failure, disappointment. And then we reflect about why the world is constructed this way. Why me? Why us? Why does this have to be this way? So there’s a double experience of these things, and part of what we’re trying to do when we console ourselves is to see our suffering, our experience, from the outside and understand its place in our understanding of the world, come to terms with it, but above all to move on. The thing I’m against is the idea that to be consoled is to be resigned, to be consoled is to give up. I think, on the contrary, to be consoled is to think I can get back on the horse. It is possible for me to go on somehow. I don’t quite know how. The world may be unjust, and the world may be unfair, but I want to continue in it, and live in it, and prevail in it to the degree that I can.

In “The Voice in the Whirlwind,” your chapter on the Book of Job and the Book of Psalms, you write: “Like Job, the Psalmists engage in a constant dialogue with God asking him to explain the intolerable gap between the world as it is and the world as they wish it to be.” Again, this reminds me of the consoling nature of poetry, and W.S. Merwin’s line that poetry is “an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.”

There’s a way of talking about this that makes it fancier than it is, more abstract than it is. One of the things I learned writing this book is just how intrinsic to being a human being these questions are. We ask, why the hell did this happen to me? How is it possible that the world is so constructed that my child dies? That I lose my wife? That luck, malign luck, plays such a horrible role in the lives of people around me? How does this happen? And so I don’t want to think of consolation as some kind of preserve of the poets, or philosophers, or the historians. I want to think of it as something that just … is inescapable for all of us.

And, yes, thank God we have the poets, because the poets put it into words. Because, at least for me, part of what being in a hole is about is just not having any words for what’s going on inside me, or going on around me. And the great poets are the ones who find the words, and there’s consolation simply in rendering things articulate.

That’s why art is at the center of any thinking about consolation, simply because art takes the inarticulate, the inexpressible, and finds words for it. And then we say, “Aha, that’s what’s happening. That’s how to understand it.” And the minute you can say, “Aha, I see. I sort of understand it,” you’re in a very different place. I’m not necessarily saying you’re more hopeful, but you suddenly have a grasp of what you’re going through, which is enormously important.

Freud understood this. I mean, what was the “talking cure” but getting into the articulation of things that seem inexpressible? He understood, and poets have understood, and the psalmists understood, that passing from the inarticulate to the articulate is crucial to what humans do to deal with what is unspeakable, what is horrible, what is unbearable.

One of the reasons that consolation is such an interesting subject is that it takes us to the limits of language. It shows us, on the one hand, what the power of language is, and great poets have this magical power to render the inarticulate articulate. But it’s also clear from our own experience when we try to console somebody who’s lost their wife or partner of many years, that we just sit with them, in silence, because there’s just nothing to say.

So consolation takes us to the limits of language, to the limits of what can be said, and reminds us of something that’s part of life, which is that there are some things for which we can properly and with good reason remain inconsolable throughout our lives. There are sorrows that do not heal. That’s also part of what we have to understand about being a human being, and thinking about consolation allows you to approach and address those issues as well.

All this reminds of that moment at the end of The Iliad when Priam comes to Achilles and begs for the return of his son Hector’s slain body.

Yes. A famous scene.

It’s maybe the most heartbreaking moment in literature when Priam says to Achilles, who’s just slaughtered his son, “think of your own father.” And Achilles breaks down. He breaks down because there’s no language for it. It’s an appeal to the absolute, the absolute humanness in us, which is loss. And then they break bread together. You can imagine them, in silence…

Absolutely. And the wisdom of that is the understanding that consolation is something we do together. And in this case, what makes that so astonishing a scene is it’s a meeting between enemies, mortal enemies, who manage somehow to console each other for loss, but in rituals that they share, and that a recognition occurs between them across the hatred and the loss. Yes, there are many people who agree with you that it’s one of the most touching scenes in literature, and above all consoling to us because it reminds us of what good is possible. This is why there’s hope in that. It reminds us that it is possible for two men to have suffered, to have been enemies, to eat together and come to some mutual understanding of each other. We need to keep that in mind. …

To be continued in the next TFP post: Part two of ‘We Are Not Alone, and We Never Have Been,’ a conversation with Michael Ignatieff about On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times. Like all TFP conversations, this conversation has been edited for length and clarity.