The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.That profound paragraph is from Henry David Thoreau.
Men, and women, lead lives of quiet desperation to which they have resigned themselves.
What a profound paragraph!
But, no, I was not reading any of Thoreau's works. In the contemporary hypertexted world, in which Google search is my most trusted helper, I came across that Thoreau passage in a most interesting, and very depressing route.
I will begin from the beginning.
On Facebook, a friend had posted a link to this Washington Post story about yet another Foxconn employee committing suicide. (The byline, too, caught my attention; but, I don't want to digress at this point.) The employee was only 24 years old when he jumped from his dorm room and died. He was a poet, and,
A distraught friend and fellow Foxconn employee also wrote a poem. "Another screw comes loose/Another migrant worker brother jumps," Zhou Qizao writes, a day after Xu's death. The poem ends: "A white-haired father, holding the black urn with your ashes, stumbles home."It is from this that I borrowed the words for the title of this post.
I read the comments at the end of the story. One comment quoted Thoreau:
“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them.” -- Henry David ThoreauThe skeptic in me wondered whether that wonderfully sounding quote was for real--I have seen and read enough in this world to worry that something that seems too good to be true might not be true. Which is when I put my able assistant, Google, to work. At multiple sites, I then came across that complete passage, which I quoted at the beginning of this post. (The quote about "the song still in them" is, of course, a misquote!)
So, now, back to "quiet desperation." I agree with the 24-year old who committed suicide that such a life is not worth living. I wish he had not killed himself though.
But, quietly desperate lives are what most people have resigned themselves to. I tried that for a few months as an employed adult back in the old country. I tried that quietly desperate life for nearly six years as a non-academic. I then lucked out, and life is now good.
For quite some years now, it has been anything but a life of quiet desperation. Quiet is not the word for this blogging/tweeting/Facebooking/op-ed_writing activist-faculty rich life that I lead that is far from desperation.
The friend thinks that I am someone with "agency" that David Brooks writes about in his column. Brooks notes about George Eliot:
After the years of disjointed neediness, the iron was beginning to enter her soul and she was capable of that completely justified assertion of her own dignity. You might say that this moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she stopped being blown about by her voids and weaknesses and began to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.I won't be surprised if it takes a while to get to that stage of living "according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life." When I was a stressed out twenty-year old in an undergraduate program that was metaphorically killing me, there were plenty of moments when I felt that a literal death was a better option. I can, therefore, relate to that 24-year old Chinese employee who killed himself. It took quite some time of sustained efforts to figure out my own inner criteria to live a life of enjoyment and fulfillment and not a life of quiet desperation. As Brooks notes:
Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort. It’s not just the confidence and drive to act. It’s having engraved inner criteria to guide action. The agency moment can happen at any age, or never.If only that 24-year old had some other outlet for his agency. But, apparently he had tried:
Xu tried multiple times to leave his job at Foxconn. Applications for positions in libraries and book stores in Shenzhen proved unsuccessful. He also was turned down for a job at an internal library within Foxconn's compound. Xu moved away for a spell to be with his girlfriend in the city of Suzhou, but that relationship fell through, and he eventually made his way back to Shenzhen and Foxconn.Sometimes, we are just unable to resign ourselves to that quiet desperation in which we are trapped. It is terrible. I will wrap this lengthy post with one of Xu's poems:
I swallowed a moon made of iron
They refer to it as a nail
I swallowed this industrial sewage, these unemployment documents
Youth stooped at machines die before their time
I swallowed the hustle and the destitution
Swallowed pedestrian bridges, life covered in rust
I can't swallow any more
All that I've swallowed is now gushing out of my throat
Unfurling on the land of my ancestors
Into a disgraceful poem.
