Freedom to Suffer

 

I tried to leave you, I don't deny
I closed the book on us, at least a hundred times.
I'd wake up every morning by your side.

—Leonard Cohen, "I Tried to Leave You"

*******

Dear Kate,

It is a freedom to write, don't you agree?

How hard-earned it is and how rare still in many parts of the world—yes, even in the "democratic" societies, we might not feel even as words are dancing for their freedom to the tunes of our fingertips.

But what is freedom?  To think deeper about this or any other worthwhile topic is also a sort of freedom, but rather different from the freedom to write what we want, don't you think?

Simplistically and classically put, there are two sorts of freedoms (with a dozen iterations and endless implications): negative and positive.  The former is to understand freedom as the absence of interference (e.g. freedom to read, to write, to speak), and the latter as a person possessing the capacity or power to actually carry out what she wants to freely do.

Freedom is dangerous, as any parent would know and worry till the end.  What is the more dangerous idea though: having the freedom to do what we want or possessing the power to actually do it?

I asked you to respond to my last letter; authentic human words I want, bloody as hell.  No sermonizing, no abstractions, but something that would "swim easily from the Other to the Self and back, at once personal and universal, intimate and 'epic.'"  No one is interfering with your writing.  You won't lose your job, your house, your way of life for speaking your mind (still by and large true in our world).  But I am putting a burden, a heavy load on you the writer: write something that would actually honor this freedom.

Do you possess the capacity, the power to actually...write?

To use Rousseau’s famous phrase, I am forcing you to be free.  It is not enough that we debate about whether a person should be coerced to take the vaccine or not.  We need to ask ourselves: what do we plan to do with our freedom?  What is your vision of human flourishing, now that you have freely chosen to take all the shots and observed all the mandates?  And if you think the vaccine is a bad way to get us out of our present trouble, what do you have in mind for yourself, your family, your fellow human beings to flourish again and better?

You think I come here to write every morning just because there is no interference?  I have a dozen troubles on my mind and each can do more than interfering to my life.  If anything, freedom to me would actually be to stop writing and close my book of longing—which I did try, at least a hundred times.

"Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering."  Dostoevsky, a little writer that you said you read.

Yours, Alex