Laughing & Death

Not much laughing when you're depressed. I think Go ahead and laugh at a funeral. Nietzsche says it’s okay explains why not:

You have to be in a certain mood to have a laugh. When we’re terrified, sad, or furious about something, it’s hard to find things funny. As the French philosopher Henri Bergson put it, there is an “absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled.”

There was no calmness in my head. Constant mental bickering fueled by distrust of existence and self-loathing, between a desire for an escape to peace and quiet and a dogged sense of being able to rescue myself from the failure of my life.

Used to be I could laugh at myself. That talent seems to have returned. More than counseling, I attribute this to getting reacquainted with old influences such as Nietzsche and Thoreau, and making some new ones, too. When one plans for destroying one's life fail and suicide no longer is an option, then one needs to figure out how to live and that includes learning to laugh again. As the article points out, Nietzsche is a good teacher:

This is exactly what the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw in laughter. When we ridicule something, we diminish or deflate it. It is why despots around the world hate people laughing at them. It makes them look small. Nietzsche, in his work, The Gay Science, believes this is exactly the balm necessary in the face of a meaningless world. He argued that only with explosive gaiety can we give light to the darkness. For Nietzsche, laughter is the greatest medicine and weapon we have by which to take on “abysmal thoughts.”

 We are all fools and humility is a virtue, then laughing at ourselves is virtuous.

sch 7/13/22