The Will to Heal

Green leafed plant growing the dust

Source: Engin Akyurt/Pexels

There is a kind of hope — the most common kind, perhaps — which is based on the belief that the universe will not forsake us. That events will unfold as we wish and chance will favor our cause. We may call this outward-looking hope.

There is another, inward-looking type of hope, based not on a yearning and an expectation that external events would go a certain way, but on self-trust. We have this kind of hope when we resolve to not let ourselves down; when we make a pact with ourselves and promise to be our own allies and make full use of the resources at our disposal in order to remedy our situation.

In an essay on self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that the person who has this type of inward-looking hope, based on self-trust, never provokes pity but only gratitude and even reverence:

Let a Stoic open the resources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but can and must detach themselves; that with the exercise of self-trust, new powers shall appear; that a man is the word made flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out of the window, we pity him no more, but thank and revere him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splendor, and make his name dear to all history. [1]

The person who has learned a lesson from the Stoics, Emerson says, has “not one chance but a hundred chances.” [2] This is because a self-reliant person does not wait for the world to present an opportunity on a silver platter, as it were, but actively seeks and creates opportunities.

Such a person reminds us of what we are capable of. The self-reliant are merely human, and so is their strength. And human strength we have also.

This is not to suggest that a self-reliant person doesn’t seek help. Nor does it follow from the fact you don’t seek help or stubbornly refuse it when it is offered that you rely on yourself in the relevant sense. One may be completely resigned and embrace hopelessness and brokenness yet reject help due to pride.

What distinguishes self-reliant people is not that they refuse outside help but that they are always ready to help themselves. If you ask someone else for help and the person lets you down, that may hurt, but you do not, in addition, have to inflict a second blow by letting yourself down too.

How might one become self-reliant? The answer, I think, is that we must begin not when it is hard, but when it isn't. There is a connection between the ability to make use of one’s inner reservoir of strength when times are bad, and the habit of choosing for oneself when times are good. We have to try and plant the seed of resilience when resilience isn’t yet needed. We can do this by acquiring habits of self-trust: thinking for ourselves and choosing for ourselves.

These are, perhaps, not very widespread habits. In De Profundis, a letter written in prison, Oscar Wilde — who got imprisoned for “gross indecency with other men” — following Emerson, suggests plausibly that very few of us march to their own drum:

‘Nothing is more rare in man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone’s else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. [3]

Wilde says that he himself had lost any sense of self-mastery before his imprisonment. In his case, the ruling forces were not customs and other people’s opinions but desire for pleasure:

Desire, at the end, was a malady, or a madness, or both. I grew careless of the lives of others. I took pleasure where it please me and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character… I ceased to be lord over myself. I was no longer the captain of my soul… [4]

But if we are not the captains of our souls when the sun is shining, how could we expect to assume that role in a terrible storm, without any prior experience of being at the wheel?

This is not to suggest, however, that it cannot be done. This is my main point here. There is a part of us, I think, that remains unbroken by suffering, sealed off, as it were, from all of our maladies. If we don't let it guide us in happy times, we may not notice its presence when we feel broken. But there it is, underneath all of our ills. We can lean on it in order to heal the rest of the self. In so doing, we remain “leaning willows,” to use Emerson’s phrase, but it is on the undamaged part of our own psyches that we lean. Much as a disease can spread from the infected part to the healthy tissue, so health can spread from the unbroken part to the parts in need of repair. That is what healing — or self-healing — is.

That, it seems to me, is precisely the discovery Oscar Wilde made while innocently imprisoned. Wilde who, on his own admission, had lost charge of himself previously, sought to regain self-mastery in prison. The personal transformation began with the realization that neither morality nor religion nor reason could help him in that moment:

Trust Essential Reads

Algorithm Aversion: Who Trusts Algorithms to Make Decisions?

Are the Critics of Cognitive Immunology in Denial?

Morality does not help me. I am a born antinomian ... Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at ... Reason does not help me. It tells me that the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws ... [5]

It should be noted that despite what Wilde says about religion in this passage, it is really organized religion that he could not embrace. Wilde did not like being part of a crowd. About Christ, he speaks in the fondest of terms, calling Christ a supreme individualist and an artist who followed the law of self-perfection. (It is precisely that law that led Christ to the dictum "Forgive your enemies," according to Wilde.)

Wilde, too, was a supreme individualist and an artist. Not surprisingly, he found the ally he needed in himself. The soul whose captain he no longer was, it turned out, had not given up on him:

It was of course my soul, in its ultimate essence, that I had reached. In many ways, I had been its enemy, but I found it waiting for me as a friend. [6]

Wilde's soul, as he puts it, was waiting for him as a friend, because part of his psyche remained undamaged despite the public humiliation which had brought the writer down from the pedestal fame had put him on and had thrown him into the gutter.

Wilde goes on to say that he accepted his own suffering by reframing it and finding meaning in it. Suffering gave him insight into the human condition. He who had previously made pleasure his own personal deity now saw the world as built on suffering and suffering itself as the most real of passions:

Other things may be illusions to the eye, or the appetite, made to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star, there is pain. [7]

And also:

Behind joy and laughter there may be temperament, coarse, hard and callous. But behind sorrow there is only sorrow. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. [8]

The point here is not that Wilde saw his own situation in the particular way that he did — what suffering may reveal to us about the world and ourselves being a topic for a separate discussion – but that he met his pain on his own terms. In so doing, Wilde proved stronger than his pain.

This is not to suggest that external events cannot or should not be allowed to help us when we are down. It is only to say that such events never suffice on their own. We have to make them suffice by relating to them in the right way, for instance, by remembering what can give us strength or peace, and calling it to mind when in need.

That appears to be just what Wilde did. In one of the most moving passages — in the deeply moving letter that De Profundis is – Wilde relates an event that took place when he was brought from prison to the Court of Bankruptcy for a hearing. As Wilde was passing — handcuffed and in a prisoner’s attire — someone waited in the long, dreary corridor and raised his hat to Wilde. The gesture hushed the crowd into silence. Wilde says he cherished the event and called to mind the memory of it in order to combat the darkness he’d found himself surrounded by:

When wisdom has been profitless to me, philosophy barren, and the proverbs and phrases of those who have sought to give me consolation as dust and ashes in my mouth, the memory of that little, lovely, silent act of love has … made the desert blossom like a rose, and brought me out of the bitterness of lonely exile into harmony with the wounded, broken, and great heart of the world. [9]

It is the peculiar blessing of inward-looking hope that reconciles us to the world in a deep way. For the person whose hope is always outward-looking, the world is a happy place when hopes are fulfilled, but the joy is precarious. The environment comes to be seen as hostile and even intolerable if hopes are dashed. For those, by contrast, whose hope is based on trust in themselves, for those who can draw enough strength from a single rose in the desert in order to heal and to go on, the world is never a hostile place. For all its pain and suffering, it is home.