The strange flatness of being

There is no hierarchy to suffering

There's a scene in Saving Private Ryan where in a rare moment of quiet, the medic recalls a moment from his childhood. His mum came home from a late shift and wanted to speak to him but he pretended to sleep. He could tell she wanted to connect with him, but she didn’t want to wake him up. And so mum left him to ‘sleep’. It’s a poignant scene. We feel for the mother in the story, craving to speak with her boy. We feel the boy’s regret, withholding something from his mother. This regret has stayed with him into adulthood. And now that he glides on the edge of death, it’s too late. It’s a strange scene because we are moved by this small poignancy in the midst of shocking death. Boys are cut down to pieces all through the film, never again to see their mothers, but this one scene hits at something. Why are we so moved? Why in this one moment between a mother and a son do we see some deep sorrow of the world? In any utilitarian calculus, it’s an utterly ludicrous scene that does not belong in this deathly frieze. And yet there it is. Belonging.

A friend told me recently: there is no hierarchy to suffering. Apparently it’s a Buddhist saying.

I had a friend at university who’d recovered from leukemia. He went on to graduate and become a barrister. I once said he must have a real appreciation for life now. He told me you do — for a while. Then one day you’re sitting in traffic and it just really fucks you off.

In The Studio¹ episode ‘The Pediatric Oncologist’ the head of a Hollywood studio goes out with a pediatric oncologist. Her colleagues discuss their harrowing work — the kids saved, the kids lost. Tough days in the office. “I've been there,” he says. They make fun of him. “We live in life and death and you just deal with Rotten Tomato splats,” his date says contemptuously. As though working with movies could possibly begin to compare with kids with cancer. “I’m just saying we all have very high pressure jobs,” he replies.

It’s a funny episode, juxtaposing a life dealing with horrific kid cancer against finessing a movie about projectile diarrhea zombies. But the thing is… he’s right. On an experiential level, I am certain the peak stresses of a high-powered film executive are basically the same as a high-powered pediatric oncologist. For doctors, the existential horrors of oncology life are ground into the mundanity of daily work slop. No one walks around all day basking in the profundity of life and death. (A maternity ward doctor once told me he now treats stitching up women post-partum as an assembly line.) There are peaks and troughs and work slop through the middle. And work for the studio head follows a similar pattern: it rises to the same stakes. Peaks and troughs and work slop. There is no hierarchy to suffering. That's just how people work. A dead kid and a lost deal or a rival getting one up on you — these are functionally equivalent to the person experiencing them. Inside the amygdala, devastation doesn’t index its cause; only its intensity.

The studio head spends the next episode obsessing over whether he'll be thanked in a Golden Globes acceptance speech. [SPOILER] After an evening of wrangling, he finally is. But the speech is cut off, nobody hears it, and he goes home alone and despondent. A titan of industry, worth squillions, crushed as a schoolboy on prom night going home without even a kiss. And the thing is, his utter devastation is real. Yes, it’s a function of his and his peers’ total narcissism and pettiness and very specific status hierarchies. Yes, his life may be hollow — childless, obsessed with zombie poop explosion trailers. But for him that moment of loneliness and lack of recognition actually was devastating.

In the brutal memoir of a German soldier on the Eastern Front, The Forgotten Soldier, the author Guy Sajer writes:

Nothing is really serious in the tranquility of peace; only an idiot could be really disturbed by a question of salary.

Sajer would probably find the idea that his experience belongs in the same category as a Hollywood producer’s laughably obscene. Maybe he’s right. Maybe the flattening cracks at the extremes. But I bet one day, post-war, sitting in traffic just really ticked him off.

A classic story told by the late Rebbe goes something like this:

A poor villager tells the Rebbe his one-room home feels suffocating with his wife and kids. The Rebbe says: Bring your goat inside. A week later the man returns, frantic — now it’s chaos, noise, and stench. The Rebbe smiles: Take the goat back out. The man says, thank you Rebbe, my home suddenly feels spacious and peaceful!

Maybe the reason we feel for the medic in Saving Private Ryan is that to him the war is the goat. It revealed how precious those moments with his mum were.

You don’t want to wait for an illness or some other calamity to strike you or a loved one to realise how good you have it. And besides — at least you’re not on the Eastern Front.

Hitler's Soviet delusion

1. The Studio is great btw. Like a faster paced, scripted Curb Your Enthusiasm. The bloviating derangements of any industry can make for fun insider satires. Like Tropic Thunder, you can trust Hollywood to take the mickey out of itself — it knows where the bodies are buried.