In Sigmund Freud’s short but powerful essay, On Transience, he recounts a conversation he had while walking in the mountains with a friend and a melancholic poet. The poet bitterly complains that he is unmoved by the beauty around him, knowing that it will soon perish. Freud rebuffs the illogicality of this position, transience ought to increase the pleasure and enjoyment we have of things! ‘Limitation in the possibility of an enjoyment raises the value of the enjoyment.’ He explains that the poet’s mistake is his inability to mourn; the poet isn’t allowing himself to love and enjoy beauty because he can’t bear the hurt that will inevitably follow upon losing it. Freud’s essay is an argument for mourning – he is asking his readers to show more fortitude than the poet, to confront what we know will one day hurt us.
Jonathan Lear tells us that this conversation is likely to be a fictional merging of two events, a walking holiday Freud had in the Dolomites, and his first meeting with Rainer Maria Rilke, which took place in Munich a few months afterwards. There is something unreal about the essay. It feels as though we have been welcomed into a debate taking place within Freud’s own mind, as he reflects on the devastating events that followed soon after.
The poet’s insensitivity to nature parallels Freud’s own difficulty accepting the death of his most cherished ideal: that of human goodness and progress.
‘A year later the war broke out and robbed the world of its beauties. It destroyed not only the beauty of the countrysides through which it passed and the works of art which it met with on its path but it also shattered our pride in the achievements of our civilization, our admiration for many philosophers and artists and our hopes of a final triumph over the differences between nations and races.’ (307, Volume 14)
The beauty that Freud is struggling to mourn is his enlightenment hope that humankind is finally on the right path, that we might one day be able to heal the conflicts that divide us. While the poet is struggling to appreciate the natural beauty of the mountains; Freud is struggling to love humanity itself.
The stark message of the essay seems to be: Remember, we will lose everything that we love. And Freud is asking us to reflect (I don’t think he’s found an answer yet) what exactly are we supposed to do with that fact? What would knowing this, truly, mean for how we go about our lives?
I have been thinking recently about another aspect of transience not touched upon by Freud in his essay. I just finished a placement in an Older Adults Psychology Service, and there too I was continually reminded of the fact of our mortality. We are often unwell, we get old (if we are lucky), and then we die. As a society I think we are terribly good at forgetting that fact, and I’m grateful to Freud for reminding us of it.
But another consequence of our finitude is that our opportunities steadily narrow as time passes. Because we only have one life, time passing is itself a collection of infinitely many little deaths. We lose our childhood, our school years, our adolescence. We have many ‘first times’ and equally many ‘last times’ (though we rarely notice the latter). We only get each experience once. When you start properly considering this fact it is quite staggering. Whatever was, was. Many of us try to extend our potentiality as long as possible – by continuing to learn, maybe staying in higher education, maybe changing careers later on, maybe by looking for ourselves in our children. And of course we can always focus instead on the future, on the hope that we will still have more time. We can shift the focus and think of all the things we have not yet experienced! But that is purely a hope, not a certainty. The beautiful piece by Courtney Bowers pained me to tears, thinking of a life tragically cut short to 17 (and all the lives we hear about, and those we knew and loved, who similarly didn’t get enough time).
So the feeling I associate most with transience is actually regret. Regret is the painful acknowledgement that we only get one chance with our life; because it only arises when we feel that we have thrown away, or ruined, some limited opportunity. There is something incredibly difficult about tolerating and feeling regret. I think it is one of the emotions we are most quick to try to transform into something else: ‘It doesn’t matter, wasn’t important anyway,’ ‘I’ll try harder next time,’ ‘I won’t bother trying again.’ And those responses might be perfectly justified. But I would like to borrow Freud’s lesson on mourning here, for this equally difficult feeling, regret.