AROUND THE KITCHEN TABLE

Don Ward

“This world is a comedy to those that think,” wrote Horace Walpole, and “a tragedy to those that feel.”

Walpole was an 18th-century “man of letters” and a person of great learning, but from my 21st-century perspective he appears to have been wrong about the world.

In a literal sense, people who think but don’t feel are called sociopaths, and people who feel but don’t think rarely live to talk about it, because they have been struck by a bus or encountered some other nasty fate while they were busy not thinking. In the normal life, however, thinking and feeling go hand in hand. To the normal person, the world is both a tragedy and a comedy — sometimes both at once.

Consider poor Job: the Sabeans made off with his oxen and donkeys; his sheep and herders were struck by lightning and killed; the Chaldeans made a raid on his camels and put his workers to the sword; and, as if that weren’t enough, his children were taking a meal in the eldest brother’s house when “suddenly a great wind came across the desert, struck the four corners of the house, and it fell on the young people, and they are dead,” according to the only surviving servant.

Job was then afflicted by “loathsome sores . . . from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head,” and his wife urged him to “Curse God and die.”

The human heart understands the woman’s response: she has lost everything she loves and values, except her husband, and it is clear from the biblical text that Job is not too pleased by the way things have turned out, either. He has been “a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil.” He didn’t deserve this.

But the tragedy seems to degenerate into comedy as misfortune after misfortune is heaped upon poor Job’s head and he ends up talking to people with names like Bildad the Shuhite and Elihu son of Barachel the Buzite who urge him to repent because it’s obvious that all his afflictions are the result of his own previous sins.

To his wife, Job responded, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” To his friends he defended his integrity, saying that “my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.”

When he finally demanded an explanation from God, the Lord’s reply was typically obscure: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . . Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?”
We can imagine Job scratching his head and saying, “That’s not what I asked.”

The point seems to be that God’s majesty is infinite and his ways mysterious and it’s not up to us to figure it out. We all have days or weeks — or sometimes years — where we begin to think we know what Job went through, when we are stretched to our physical and emotional limits and life is “just one damn thing after another,” as the diarist Elbert Hubbard wrote, or, as Edna St. Vincent Millay countered, “one damn thing over and over.”

“Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on,” said Samuel Butler, except that you never really get it right, and after 50 or 60 years you’re still making the same mistakes.

What Job teaches us is that it’s all right to make mistakes, because this world is both a tragedy and a comedy, because God is God and we are human and life is a brief interlude between two great mysteries.