We discussed humor. There was speculation about the role of wry humor, the benefits of the proximity of laughter to our well being. I enjoy the presence of humorous individuals. I think that most do.

My formative years were spent among people who in retrospect were humorless. They were moralists, that overweening focus upon morality and “purity of heart.” All of that grim, grey twilight was driven by a fear of God’s wrath, of being on the “wrong side of the line” of God’s judgment when Jesus returns. In the look-back over my shoulder, I shudder and think to myself, “what a waking nightmare.”

Certainly that viewpoint, a “construct” of reality, contributed to several years of what seemed a severe bout of depression. I recall a therapist who suggested that I reflect upon my suffering, to grasp how surreal, how ironic were my dark thoughts, in order to tip the balance, to initiate a habit of taking myself with a “grain of salt.”

We homo sapiens are ironic mammals. We are ritualistic, habituated to behavior that does not follow the rules logic. Of all mammals, we are vulnerable to becoming deeply troubled and we are stunningly creative, inventive of meaning, of beauty.

We suffer and we laugh.

Do you desire to be more human? Then you must, and you will suffer… And there’s no room for self-pity.

The discipline of suffering,
of great suffering – don’t you know
that this discipline
has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far?

The tension that breeds strength
into the unhappy soul,
its shudder at the sight of great destruction,
its inventiveness and courage in enduring,
surviving, interpreting,
and exploiting unhappiness,

and whatever depth, secrecy,
whatever masks, spirit, cunning, greatness it has been given:
– weren’t these the gifts of suffering,
of the disciple of great suffering?

In human beings, creature and creator are combined:
in humans there is material,
fragments, abundance,
clay, dirt, nonsense,
chaos;

but in humans there is also creator,
maker, hammer-hardness,
spectator-divinity
and seventh day:
– do you understand this contrast?

And that your pity
is aimed at the “creature in humans,”
at what needs to be molded,
broken, forged, torn, burnt, seared and purified,
– at what necessarily
needs to suffer and should suffer?

Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche, trans. by Judith Norman, aphorism 225

What! Conclude this without a tune!? That would be sacrilegious.  The Cranberries feature the breath taking harmonies of Dreams.  A different way to be indeed!