Our current speaker of the House of Representatives is a fellow named John Boehner (pronounced Bayner, not Boner), a Republican from Ohio, who has turned out to be a crybaby. Literally. He gets misty and falls into tears at the drop of a hat—and sometimes without even that much provocation.
Back in January the New York Times ran a story about Boehner and his teary-eyed tendencies, “Big Boys Don’t Cry, Do They?” by a Mr. John Schwartz, who is himself a crybaby, he confessed in the article, falling recently into tears over a movie, a song, and his child’s eighth-grade graduation. Schwartz got some psychologist to confirm that tears are indeed “normal” and that it’s okay to cry when one is “overcome by bittersweet blends like nostalgia.” Tears are “part of the emotional vocabulary of being alive,” according to another one of the crybabies, Robert Krulwich of NPR. One-time network newscaster Dan Rather, still another crybaby, is quoted as saying crying’s okay because it’s an “authentic” response, and that there’s “no apologizing for grief.”
The whole idea of middle-aged men sobbing away is also the storyline of a $200 million 1999 comedy, Analyze This, with Robert De Nero and Billy Crystal as a bawling mobster and his unwilling shrink. The movie shifts back and forth between hysterical laughter and hysterical weeping.
All this coverage of men misting up is no doubt a psychologically telling reflection of our times (very possibly journalistic money in the bank too), but none of it helps me in the least with my own tears, which are embarrassing, maddening, and humiliating. Not in the least funny.
I always get furious with myself over the tears, feel mortified that I can’t control them, and turn my head in shame when they overcome me—but, and here’s the cruelest rub: there’s something else about them that just as powerfully makes me feel more alive, “more in tune with my feelings,” and more intensely human than I am at any other moments in my life. In other words, I hate the tears and love them at the same time, the very definition of ambivalence.
I remember when the high tide of feelings and tears first washed over me. Up to that time, I was pretty much like every other man who sneered with superiority at wusses who shed sentimental tears; I had a manly contempt for women who broke down over romantic movies or ones with dogs and babies. I knew my role. But in 1979, when I was 37, my ten-year-old daughter was selected to play one of the children in the Newton High School production of The King and I, and I have never been the same since.
When I saw the opening night performance, I was merely doing my fatherly duty, never something I resisted when it came to my children, but the sort of thing I had long since by then come to see as a lifelong series of tiresome obligations. One bites the bullet and does the right thing, after all.
Seeing the high schoolers and grade schoolers working their tails off, however, seeing their all-in commitment to the production, filled me with unfamiliar feelings. This wasn’t just another of the numberless high school productions of The King and I, I realized, this was a group of youngsters performing a play—rising, that is, to the demands of art—and somehow asserting their humanity in the process. These were actors, emblems of human possibility. They were defiantly facing down death by putting their peculiar, terribly young, life-affirming mark on the universe. These children made me proud to be human. I know, of course, that it doesn’t do to put these wild thoughts into such over-the-top words, such over-stimulated language—but that is what I experienced at the opening night performance of the Newton High School production of The King and I, that and a horrifying stream of tears that I had to fight down as best I could. These were feelings way out of proportion to the stimulus.
We are surely—and who would care to argue the point?—a self-destructive species, but we are also a life-affirming one, a people hell-bent on asking and answering the Big Questions and leaving a brave, if quavering, statement about our time on planet Earth, which is itself the merest speck in the corner of one galaxy in a universe containing hundreds of billions of galaxies. Despite our tininess, or perhaps because of it, the Newton High School production of The King and I put me in mind of the unruly, sprawling universe and our own very small place in it, and it made me proud to be human—and yes, it moved me to tears. It all links up in my mind and in my heart.
Of course, The King and I made me think further about the root reason for my tears. How is it that I can watch a high school musical and see the death spiral of a supernova? One part of the reason is that I’ve always had a keener sense of death than most other people seem to. I can’t prove that, of course—it merely seems that way to me because I can’t imagine anyone else being more morbidly sensitive to the transience of life than I am. As a very young child, I had nightmares of dying, and as a youngster in school, I recall becoming frightened by the lesson on life spans. I was deeply shaken when I learned that trees too, the universal symbols of permanence and time-defying majesty and mystery, also had life spans. It was devastating to think that they too die.
And then, moments later, the rest of it became frighteningly clear: everything, my teacher said, had a life span, even mountain chains, rivers, and the planet itself. Even our own star, the sun, will eventually burn itself out. I remember this coming as paralyzingly painful news. Nothing was permanent—except perhaps something called “infinity,” which I learned in Sunday School was the cost of sin—everlasting punishment. More bad news. This was especially bad, it seemed to me, because eternal happiness in Heaven didn’t seem as likely as eternal damnation in Hell. It was bad news/bad news: you have to die, and then you go to Hell. Forever.
Through the intervening years, between ages eight and sixty-eight, I was able to shed most (not all, mind you) of my fear of eternal punishment, but my sense of loss—the loss of time and most of all, of loved ones—has never stopped tormenting me. And so when I see things that I love very much, I simultaneously mourn their inevitable loss, their passing into history. Their death. I have grieved and cried about all that through the years, although having now passed through Middle Age, I think I may be through the worst of the sobbing. There is a certain contented agreement I have these days with the Roman poet Horace, who wrote in the first century B. C.: “Not even Heaven upon the past has power; / What has been, has been, and I have had my hour.”
For all those many middle years, however, and occasionally even now, I was moved to tears by all sorts of life-affirming assertions of human will and imagination and intelligence and dignity; by the painful idea of life spans; by the sense that everything is dying daily before my very eyes; and by the losses I encounter every day in my personal universe as well as in the larger one we live in. I cried over athletes at the peak of their performance; at characters on stage, especially when they are enabled by brilliant words from talented playwrights, and I still cry when people in every walk of life prevail over great odds to achieve something they had no business thinking they could do. It is the human species and spirit, replete with genetically predetermined limitations and infinitely grand aspirations that make me proud enough to cry over.
Unfortunately, however, I can still be moved to tears by less worthy examples, like sentimental movies, Hallmark greeting cards, and television commercials that feature old people talking on the telephone to their grandchildren—just to take three random examples. They all seem to trigger the same embarrassing, maddening, and humiliating tears that make me grab a tissue and duck for cover. I can deal with my tears better than I used to, no doubt because in my Old Age they come less frequently, and no doubt too because I am convinced by now that tears really are, after all, “part of the emotional vocabulary of being alive,” but I always like it better when no one sees me sniveling, when I don’t have to suffer, that is, the indignities of other people’s contempt. It’s so much easier that way. Sob.
Addendum. From a reading of Tolstoy’s War and
Peace a year after writing the essay above. Here the beautiful and recently-come-of-age Natasha is playing
the clavichord and singing, and Prince Andrew, listening in a corner of the
room, catches a sob deep in his throat:
Prince Andrew
stood by a window talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking
and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for
him. He looked at Natasha as she sang,
and something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet
he was ready to weep. What about? His former love? [He was a widower.] The little princess? His disillusionments? . . . His hopes for the future? . . . Yes and no.
The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast
between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited
and material something that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him
while she sang. (Vol. I, Part 6, Chapter 19)
Tolstoy's power of perception is matched only by the elegance of his language. Bravo.
