How Despair may Lead

Job, Oedipus, Lear, the connection, the search

Image by Kayla on Unsplash

Note: The essay appeared as a guest post with a lovely introduction on

Elizabeth Bobrick

’s Substack on Greek Tragedy — with my thanks.

How Despair May Lead: Job, Oedipus, Lear and some thoughts

Martin Buber says, “All real living is meeting.” I’ve learned how right Buber was through my teaching and through Substack, the cadre of friends in literature I’ve found here including the marvel in the study of Greek plays that is Elizabeth Bobrick. Her posts have led me to revisit Sophocles’ Oedipus plays, Oedipus Rex, Oedipus at Colonus, “Job” in the Bible and Shakespeare’s King Lear, all integrally related as death has entered my life and my narratives.

I use the word “narrative” because, at life’s end, don’t we all hope our lives form some sort of narrative that gives meaning to the search for who we are? I want to continue to form that narrative through the search for meaning.

When I was 24, I wrote a letter to get my first job in the business world when a move caused me to leave my beloved high school teaching. I went to college when I was barely 16 and had my first master’s degree by age 21 so I had three years of teaching under my belt by then. I still have the rough draft for this letter, scrawled on yellow graph paper, a letter written in my attempt to get a job, and I wrote this to a senior think tank director and can’t believe I thought this letter was a good idea, but here it is: “I’m intrigued by the probing questions of authors concerning the human condition. And I’ve learned that the questions never really seem to change although the answers do. What I’m trying to express is the extraordinary unity in man’s questionings throughout time and the unique ways in which he has attempted to answer the unanswerable. Job on the ash heap cries out for a rationale for his punishment; Oedipus is caught in a world that he attempts to understand and control, but is doomed inevitably powerless; Lear in his madness cries, ‘Is man no more than this?’ It seems that the questions, the cries of anguish, in the face of the incomprehensible and inevitable, poignantly and meaningfully unite all men and all epochs of time and thought. These questions represent for me an assimilation of my reading; for reading has become an assimilation into my own experience. From my reading and from my teaching, I hope I’ve learned compassion and understanding for life, to search, to question, to try to understand. My study of literature has given me much more than a compilation of names and titles; it has given me, what I hope, is a sensitivity to existence.” This was before my life fell apart.

At 49, I quit that corporate job I’d taken to support my children. I was particularly confused because I was confronted with the defining moment in all our lives: death: My sister and my parents were dying. Of course, we are all “dying,” but they were doing it with the certainty that illness can provide. My mother was anemic most of my childhood while her doctors searched for where the blood leaked from her. I think now that her body wept, that it wept for my sister who was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes when she was twelve and I was six. Her homecoming from the hospital—I have it on an eight-millimeter home movie my father shot—changed my life. Nabokov in Lolita says there are two kinds of visual memory: one when you open your eyes and the other when you close them and the memory lives on the inside of your eyelids. That film is like that for me. I can close my eyes and see it because after that day our lives would never be the same. When I was in my twenties and my sister was turning thirty, she became ill in the heart and the legs and the eyes—the devastation that diabetes can become came on her young.^[i] My mother and my father, though he was the strongest of the three, got sick, too, while I remained well and strong, a fact that later plagued me.

When my 83-year-old father, before he died, called me in the middle of the night in the anguish of aging, he asked: “What am I here for?” —a despairing cry that expressed the humility of existence and underscored the imperative of continuing to ask the question even as the darkness moves across us.

And then all three died, one after another, my sister when she was fifty-three. And my job made no sense to me. I’d been encouraged by one published personal essay on the op-ed page of the New York Jewish Week in 1987 when my youngest child was 13. I now think of that as fate because I just sent it and they took it—never happens in the writing world, anyway, unusual. And so I kept writing, journaling, began taking classes at George Washington University. When I was 49, I went back to school on a full-financial ride (I had no job to pay for this leap), backpack on my back, hiking boots on my feet and I trudged to class with students half my age.

Then in 2017, my son died at age forty-six—and I was thrown into the depths of despair I’d not known—even with the losses of mother, sister, father.

How to choose the sweetness of life when despair strikes like a switch on the back that won’t stop?

Now, I think of my first reading of “Job,” my first reading of Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus, of King Lear and how these stories seem joined in the despair and the questions like my father’s plea before he died. Perhaps oddly, Job’s questioning of the wisdom of God strikes home, as does the inclusion of Satan in that tale. Where is the evil when it seems to lie outside ourselves? Job’s inability to lie, his anger strike home the way Oedipus must face both what he’s done in Rex and then his search for forgiveness in Colonus and then how the shifts in these two plays mirror the recognition, the change in Lear. Job, Oedipus and Lear ultimately are most wise when in the depths of despair, and in Lear’s case, most sane when he’s declared mad, crazy-mad.

As I’ve explained, the way the three tales, so far apart in their origins, tie me to them and undoubtedly to each other hit me early but then again when my father called and asked his human and humane question, a cry in the night. I knew I was about to lose him but also that he imparted wisdom with that cry, a shout across the epochs of his time alive and mine.

But what had seemed like meaning when I first made the connections among these stories got thrown into the depths of despair when my oldest son died, out of order and way too young.

How to come through, as if anyone can? But the stories that lie as my literary foundation also lie as my foundation for the search for meaning. I’m not saying the journey is over nor that any of what I describe has been easy. What has come clear though is that the search—like, Job who “arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground,” I did. Like Oedipus who, when at Colonus says, “Woe is me. What will become of us?”—I spoke those words. Like Lear in his madness, who cried, “I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears/ Do scald like molten lead,” I dissolved.

And then I searched.

In the prologue to my memoir, I say—and this that holds true even now: “Rabbi Hillel, who spoke these words 2,000 years ago, has been widely quoted ever since, perhaps most notably in my lifetime by the ilk of Primo Levi and Robert F. Kennedy.

“If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, then what am I? And if not now, when?

“Truly knowing what these words mean has come from the place of not knowing. And by this, I mean that I have had to live this journey without the full understanding of their plain-spoken sense. I have had to learn the hard way.”

I continue the search with a hopeful heart and with the conviction that the search matters and that despair may lead.

My next guest is the marvelous essayist and oh so smart

Jonathan Foster

: We welcome him!

Mary Tabor writes:

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^[i] A qualifier here: Insulin was discovered in 1921; my sister was born in 1940—If you are a type 1 Juvenile diabetic, your future is bright and strong. Hers was not.