Good Mourning

Lately, I have been doing a lot of mourning. Some of it feels premature, some of it more fitting, all of it to be expected when dealing with the knowledge of two loved ones having terminal illnesses. More often than I would like to admit, I find myself mourning for younger and future versions of myself, too; a sort of recognition of where I am in life.

When I have these reflective thoughts about mourning, I am reminded of the Roman poet Horace—a man who, upon first glance, seems to reject mourning altogether—and the late philosopher Jonathan Lear whose work proposes mourning as a necessary part of human flourishing.

Horace was a Roman poet who lived during the fall of the Roman Republic into the early years of the Roman Empire under the rule of Augustus.1 His work has a certain sentimental quality to it due to its rather unique autobiographical nature, which was uncommon for poets at the time; other information about his life comes to us from an anonymous biographical note, which is typically attributed to Suetonius and his De Poetis (On Poets) under the title Vita Horati (Life of Horace).2 Horace was born on December 8th, 65 BCE and died on November 27th, 8 BCE.3 He spent his childhood in the town of Venusia on a small farm with his father, who had become a local official of some kind after being freed from slavery.4 In his youth, Horace left for Rome and then Athens to study literature and philosophy respectively, which is where he claims to have developed a sense of moral attitudes that permeate his writings.5 He later returned to Rome after his father’s death, and was given a position in the Roman Treasury. It was around this time that he began to write and he was fortunate enough to find a patron in Maecenas. From this patronage, he was able to afford a small farm in the Sabine Hills, where he went for respite away from the restlessness of Rome. Horace took pleasure in the simplicity of the country, and found it a source of poetic inspiration. His verses are filled with the idyllic musings of a man vacillating between valuing traditional Roman life and solitude in nature.6

Horace’s writing career was long and lasted for over half of his life. His collection of Odes takes inspiration from the lyric poetry of his Greek predecessors which he appropriates to express Roman cultural ideals. As scholar Kenneth Quinn states:

The Odes are a demonstration that poetry which is neither didactic nor ostensibly serious in tone can be an expression of a philosophy of life. The context most often is that of everyday social life in that section of urban society which had the leisure to devote itself to the life of wine, women, and song.7

The nature of Horace’s Odes is reflective of Roman cultural values and ways of life, yet the poet’s air of detachment creates a tension between the moral themes he addresses (both implicitly and explicitly) and his readers. The poems are complex in form and content. Thus, Horace presents us with a delicate and meditative look at Roman attitudes. We can see this with the way that Horace speaks of mourning in his Odes, namely II.20 and III.30.

The epilogue to Book II of Horace’s Odes presents us with the image of a man entirely rejecting the concept of mourning. The subject of the first stanza is Horace himself as “biformis vates,” a two-formed poet. “Biformis” is an uncommon word, and a likely reference to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which Horace alludes to in the physical change from a man to a bird that he describes in the third stanza.8 Horace’s Ode uses an extended metaphor for aging through the transformation from man to bird. He grows white feathers rather than grey hair as he becomes a swan (album alitem; ales). He is a bird of no ordinary feather (usitata penna) and will neither be held in the clear sky (tenui ferar per… liquidum aethera) nor remain long on the ground (in terris morabor longius). The word choices of “aethera” for “sky” and “terris” for “ground” are distinct, as they could alternatively be read as “heaven” and “earth” respectively. This language suggests a placelessness and an existence somewhere between realms: the immortal heavens and the mortal earth. From the first stanza, we glean that Horace considers himself to have a dual nature in terms of his body and place in the world. The purpose of such a transformation is to show to the reader how Horace predicts his legacy shall live on after his death. No longer a man and now a bird, his songs shall travel through the skies and be known beyond the limits of the empire. Horace describes his own funeral as empty (inani funere). The poem ends with him telling the reader to restrain their crying (conpesce clamorem) and disregard pointless respect of the tomb (sepulcri mitte supervacuos honores)—or “keep quiet, don’t mourn me at my tomb.”

The Latin word “vates,” as Horace’s adjectival modifier “biformis” suggests, is itself two-formed. Vates has a dual meaning as a word for both “poet” and “prophet.” The term evolved from its sole usage of “prophet” to its additional meaning of “poet” during the Augustan Age. This addition brought on a more pronounced relationship between the notion of poets and prophets, with the two blending into overlapping ideas.9 On the etymology of the word itself, St. Isidore of Seville says in his Etymologies that, “Vates are so called from ‘force of mind’ (vis mentis), and the meaning of the word is manifold, for now it means “priest,” now “prophet,” now “poet.”10 This “vis mentis” the vates possesses is one that draws a connection to the power of prophets, on which Isidore says, “[t]hose whom the pagan world calls bards (vates) we call prophets (propheta), as if they were ‘pre-speakers’ (praefator), because indeed they speak (fari, ppl. fatus) and make true predictions about the future.”11 The mind of the vates has a force which allows him or her to make accurate claims about the future through speech (i.e. their words). As a biformis vates, Horace foretells that his flight shall give him greater fame than the myth of Daedelus and Icarus (Iam Daedaleo notior Icaro). Throughout the duration of his poem, Horace is self-assured in his evasion of death.12

In what feels like a reprise to his previous epilogue, Horace concludes Book III of his Odes with a eulogy to himself. Odes III.30 is a playful imagining and praising of Horace’s own future legacy. The poem declares that he “shall not fully die” (non omnis moriar). He continues to say that “many parts of me evade burial” (multaque pars mei vitabit Libitinam). This sentence is thought-provoking in its peculiarity. Horace’s statement claims that at least some part of him, however small that may be, will live on after his death. How can one die partially? Perhaps it is simply having a legacy such as the one Horace (correctly) predicted for himself. That seems to be the answer Horace provides from the very opening line of the poem: “I have completed a monument more everlasting than bronze” (exegi monumentum aere perennius). The monument, here, being his first three books of Odes. Everlasting they are indeed. As scholar Eduard Fraenkel notes: “And yet it remained true, and remains true to the present day, that usuque ego postera crescam laude recens [“I will always ascend with fresh future praise”]. Horace’s boast turns out to be an enormous understatement.”13

Read together, these two odes form a picture of what Horace means when he makes his claims to immortality, and his opinions on his legacy, mourning, and his death. It is clear that Horace credits his evasion of a full death to the fact that he is a poet. This is how he is able to predict his immortality: he knows that his poetry will survive long after he himself is gone. For this reason, it is fair to believe that Horace understands his poems and his memory to be parts of him. It is those parts, the ones that live on in the imagination of others, which evade burial and leave his funeral empty. He may have died physically, yet he remains alive through his poetry’s impact on the world; so long as he has an audience, he is, at least in part, alive. In this way, Horace appears to refuse to mourn himself—after all he even commands that his readers do not mourn him. The poetry of Horace becomes metapoetic as he instructs how to mourn him while denying mourning altogether. Horace’s anticipation of his mourning allows him to pen his own legacy before his death occurs, and thus dictates how others will mourn him. Horace’s denial of mourning is both a recognition and an act of mourning itself.

While this may sound confusing or contradictory at first, what Horace manages to acknowledge with such a strange perspective is mourning’s dependency on others. Mourning is not a solitary act in the way we might traditionally understand. Although many people go through mourning on their own, the act of mourning requires participation of the one mourning and the person or thing mourned. The relationship between the one mourning and the mourned doesn’t end when the loss occurs: it changes form. Memories, thoughts, stories and the like serve as extensions of the mourned which we can access via imagination. Who or whatever was lost transforms into a thing to carry with us into the future. A Horatian view of mourning signals the transformation rather than a termination of a relationship. Through the act of mourning, the mourned survives, having undergone only a partial death.

For a contemporary perspective on mourning, we can turn to the philosophical work of Jonathan Lear, who connects mourning to the ancients in his own way. In his book, Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life, Lear expands upon preexisting notions of mourning through grounding it in Aristotelian virtue ethics with some additional psychoanalytic integration. His framework of mourning is deeply rooted in our humanity and emphasizes “an openness to being a beneficiary via activities of imagination and memory, receptiveness, and acknowledgment.”14 This description of mourning as something relational allows him to align mourning with human flourishing in a few ways, particularly through its connections to virtue, the Ancient Greek concept of “καλόν” (kalon), and the emotion of gratitude.

Kalon is an Ancient Greek word with several possible translations. The word is often rendered as “good,” “fine,” “noble,” or “beautiful.” Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which discusses how one can acquire virtuous character through activity, posits that one is able to achieve the ‘good life’15 through action in accordance with kalon. Aristotle himself uses kalon in various ways: as a noun aligned with virtue, as an adverb meaning “well,” in opposition to “shame” and “disgrace,” as a result of voluntary action, and for the benefit of the common good.16 It is understandable why Lear chooses not to translate kalon into any given English word; the term is multifaceted and not something which is easy to articulate or succinctly define. As Lear puts it, he uses kalon “as a signifier for a concept we may not yet have in fully accessible form,” a sort of “enigmatic good.” He loosely sketches an image of kalon as a way of acting that brings on a sense of fulfillment, achievement, and meaningfulness that is crucial to the human experience.17

Curiously, Lear claims that “mourning is itself kalon.”18 With mourning comes an acknowledgement that something good has ceased to exist; loss brings with it a sense that a kalon we once had, we will never get back. He states that:

mourning is a distinctively human way of responding to loss. It is a special manner of expressing grief—an insistence that what happened was not a mere change. The loss is testament to our previous attachments—love and hate, care and entanglements—and constitutes us as beings with a history, a history that continues to matter. In response to loss, we make meaning: re-creating in memory and imagination what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear. This seems to me a wondrous response to love and loss; a wonderous response to caring and finitude in general.19

For Lear, mourning is more than a loss: it is a confrontation of our lived experiences in the world. When a loved one dies, we are met with an ontological fracture in our lives, where our personal history splits into terms of pre-loss and post-loss. This fracture means we are mourning all the possible future memories and experiences that could have been—both pleasant and unpleasant—and must now come to terms with that impossibility. In order to cope, we find ways to bring the loss with us into the post-loss era. We take the sense of meaningfulness and fulfillment, the kalon, that we derived from our previous attachment in the pre-loss period and try to carry it with us into the unknown post-loss. In this way, mourning fundamentally alters one’s reality.

The second addition Lear makes to his concept of mourning is its relationship to the emotion of gratitude. He follows an Aristotelian account of emotion, mapping emotions as an “intermediate stage between prior event and a social response” with a hoped outcome.20 Part of what he finds unique about gratitude is its openness and flexibility. Lear charts gratitude as having two prior events, I.) a need, and II.) a favor. These events then bring on the emotion of gratitude and the expression of said gratitude as the social response. However, the hoped outcome exists freely, removed from the constraints of any traditional social rules. Gratitude depends on the benefactor and beneficiary’s relationship; there is an unspoken negotiation of circumstance between the two. The benefactor responds to the need of the beneficiary with a favor, without want or expectation of anything in return, and the beneficiary receives the favor with gratitude. In the case of mourning, as Lear argues, one must remain open to the idea of imagination and memory as benefactors. Our cognitive faculties grant us the ability to acknowledge a loss and to experience gratitude for the ways we are able to remember the loss.

The language Lear uses of benefactors and beneficiaries to describe the process of mourning parallels the author and audience dynamic of Horace. Implicit in Horace’s Odes mourning his own loss is the gratitude he has for his readers and their role in granting his immortality. Beneath the surface of the boasting and praise for his own work is a subtle acknowledgement that this immortality through fame necessitates a dependence on an audience. Horace, like Lear, recognizes imagination and memory as benefactors in the case of mourning. It is this dynamic that allows him to not fully die.

What Horace’s self-eulogizing uncovers, which Lear seems to miss since his focus lies elsewhere, is the ways in which one can utilize the imaginative aspect of mourning to foster a sort of immortality. In a commentary note on Odes III.30, scholar Kenneth Quinn says that, “one hears a literary work, or has it by heart; it can therefore outlast not only the roll of papyrus on which it was first recorded, but even bronze.”21 Horace’s poems act as a device to recall to mind their author long after he has passed: they provide something one is able to take from the pre-loss period and bring over into the post-loss period. The form of poetry helps with this memory association as its mnemonic power is well established. In the wise words of Walter J. Ong, the best way to ensure you can recall information is to “think memorable thoughts.”22 Thus, it seems to follow that the best way to ensure one is mourned is to live a memorable life.

Ong himself references Horace’s Odes III.30 in a discussion on Plato’s criticisms of writing. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates tells the titular character that writing is not useful for memory. He says, “You, being the father of writing, […] have found the remedy not of memory, but of reminding.”23 This is because writing is external from the self and those who depend on it will become forgetful; Socrates much prefers dialogue as a superior form of knowledge acquisition since the living word is able to defend itself. Expanding upon Plato’s critiques of writing, Ong says that:

“One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death. This association is suggested in Plato’s charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory. It is also abundantly evident in countless references to writing (and/or print) traceable in printed dictionaries of quotations, from 2 Corinthians 3:6, ‘The letter kills but the spirit gives life’ and Horace’s reference to his three books of Odes as a ‘monument’ (Odes III.30.1) presaging his own death,”24

What Plato gets correct is the fact that writing cannot respond. For this reason, we may think of writing as the dead word in opposition to the living word of speech. However, the written word possesses the possibility of resurrection. Ong compares written text to a pressed flower. Formerly a living thing depending on the present moment for its existence, the flower is preserved in such a way that it may be transported into other contexts throughout time past its life:

“The dead flower once alive is the psychic equivalent of the verbal text. The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers.”25

When Horace claims that parts of him will evade death, crediting this fact to his three books of Odes, he appears to have understood what Ong explicitly states: the deadness of a text is what allows for its immortality. The distinction Plato makes between the written word as an aid or pharmakon (φάρμακον) for reminding rather than memory becomes more intelligible when one considers how a text is resurrected into varying contexts. Plato’s fears are true: writing does not store memory internally. However, a written text allows for a reanimation across time through readers’ active engagement and imagination.

For Plato, memory is more of a passive process that happens to us whereas for Lear and Horace, memory becomes an active process more akin to reminding. Memory and imagination give us the ability to recall that which we have lost, and Lear argues that an ethical education teaches us the proper ways to engage with the virtues of imagination. As part of an ethical education, Lear believes that mourning is taught with the use of exemplars. He discusses how Aristotle teaches his students about King Priam as an exemplar of a noble person suffering extreme misfortune, mourning, and yet maintaining a sense of kalon. The purpose of such an ethical education for Aristotle is to enable his students how to recognize and properly participate in the kalon through the use of exemplars one may emulate, strengthen one’s virtues of imagination with said exemplars of kalon, and thus teach his students how to themselves be kalon. Aristotle’s students can remind themselves of King Priam in times of great loss so that they have a guide for how to mourn. Furthermore, Lear explains that:

“although achieving the kalon is constitutive of our happiness, and although extreme misfortune—such as a world catastrophe—can destroy our happiness, once the kalon has been achieved, nothing can completely destroy it in us. A kernel remains that is inalienable. That is Aristotle’s teaching.”26

Events of great loss—those that lead to the experience of mourning—may take away our happiness, but they cannot remove the kalon from within us. In the event of mourning, our happiness can fully die, the kalon cannot. There is, in this teaching of the kalon, an element of immortality.

Taking Horace as an exemplar for mourning, we learn how to use creative action as an expression of mourning. Odes II.20 and III.30 demonstrate how we are able to take an active role in shaping the way that we and others mourn and are mourned. The creation of a text, whatever form that may take, provides us with a device which we may use to remind ourselves and others of what was lost, to remind us of a kalon that once was. This exercise of reminding, of staying in touch with the past, particularly one’s own past, is part of what Lear claims it means to exist as a human being. Lear counts the use of our imagination as a form of play. He says that: “In play, the beauty of the exemplar is allowed to shine forth in some kind of isolation, without the complexities of the wider world.”27 Play marks a creative return in which our imagination helps us to merge our inner (past) and external (worlds). While Lear posits the mourning of an exemplar as something to form life lessons from and revisit again and again, the lesson from Horace is that playing through creative action has a way of immortalizing the mourned subject. It tells those who come after us that there once was someone or something kalon here, and now it lives on through the engagement and acknowledgement of others.

The initial draft of this essay began over two years ago. It was originally intended as a personal piece in memory of my pet bunny who passed away over five years ago at this point. It took me a while before I could acknowledge his loss in any meaningful way. I think there was a part of me that felt slightly ashamed of having such a deep emotional attachment to a non-human animal. That little creature truly was kalon and, at times, felt like the only sense of kalon in my life; I miss him dearly. I am reminded of the younger versions of myself—the one who buried her bunny in the backyard while too stunned to cry, the one who cried writing the more personal version and very first draft of this essay, and the one who never fully let herself give up on this piece—and I mourn for her, for the hopes and dreams she had, for all she has lost. Those versions of myself can feel alien, and yet they are always me. I take it as part of my responsibility to hold onto the hope she had as I recognize what was lost so that I may continue pursuing her dreams. We all experience so much loss in our lifetimes. Learning what to make of those losses is part of what it means to be human. Grief is a difficult, painful emotion. We may be tempted to avoid it, overcome with desires to numb ourselves. Understanding mourning as a way to experience gratitude can encourage us to lean into those challenging emotions. Mourning invites us to become active participants in the creation of memories of those we love—to reanimate them again and again, to find ways to immortalize the kalon.