Penumbra: Where did Alex's hope go?

At the beginning of the film The Big Chill a preacher is speaking of a character who has committed suicide. He asks, 'Where did Alex's hope go?'

Pain doesn't have to be excruciating to be exhausting. It just has to be constant and such that it can't be ignored. It's easy, for example, to ignore the sharp pain I regularly feel in my right foot. But the pain I feel pretty much all the time in my neck and shoulders and at the base of my skull is quite different. That's the kind of pain I have been in for a couple of years now. It slows me down at my job and makes it harder for me to work at the level I wish to work. What's worse than the pain itself is the energy it takes to force myself to keep working through it every day, and how that effort just drains my enthusiasm for a job I love. 

But this is easy compared to the pain and disappointment of feeling that almost no one I have trusted deserves to be trusted, which is also something I have come to feel because of what I have seen and experienced since I was injured. Nothing in my life has ever sucked the joy out of my life the way that has.

Maybe that's where Alex's hope went.

Stephen Maturin would know how to handle this little silly man

Unceasing burned the pyres (Iliad 1.43-52)

In the midst of an article about COVID-19 virus in Italy, I came upon this horrific paragraph:

With funerals banned under Italy's lockdown decree, the city crematorium is set to begin operating on a new 24-hour schedule this weekend to keep up.

All I could think of in that moment was another, equally grim line from long, long ago, the final line of the verses of Homer I quote below. Chryses, a priest of Apollo, has just finished invoking his aid for the mistreatment he and his daughter, Chryseis, have suffered at the hands of Agamemnon:

ὣς ἔφατ᾽ εὐχόμενος, τοῦ δ᾽ ἔκλυε Φοῖβος Ἀπόλλων,
βῆ δὲ κατ᾽ Οὐλύμποιο καρήνων χωόμενος κῆρ,
τόξ᾽ ὤμοισιν ἔχων ἀμφηρεφέα τε φαρέτρην:
ἔκλαγξαν δ᾽ ἄρ᾽ ὀϊστοὶ ἐπ᾽ ὤμων χωομένοιο,
αὐτοῦ κινηθέντος: ὃ δ᾽ ἤϊε νυκτὶ ἐοικώς.
ἕζετ᾽ ἔπειτ᾽ ἀπάνευθε νεῶν, μετὰ δ᾽ ἰὸν ἕηκε:
δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ᾽ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο:
οὐρῆας μὲν πρῶτον ἐπῴχετο καὶ κύνας ἀργούς,
αὐτὰρ ἔπειτ᾽ αὐτοῖσι βέλος ἐχεπευκὲς ἐφιεὶς
βάλλ᾽: αἰεὶ δὲ πυραὶ νεκύων καίοντο θαμειαί. 

Iliad 1.43-52 

So Chryses spoke as he prayed; and Apollo heard,
Down he came from the peaks of Olympus with wrath in his heart,
With his bow and closed quiver upon his shoulders.
And the arrows clattered upon the shoulders of the god
As he set out in wrath; and he came on like the night.
Then he sat far off from the ships, and loosed a shaft.
A dreadful shrieking came from his silver bow:
First he attacked the mules and swift hounds.
Then he shot down the men with his piercing arrows.
And unceasing burned the pyres for their corpses.

The fair and pleasant face of Boromir (FR 2.x.299-300)

Many a reader has noted the effect the Ring has on Frodo when he looks upon Bilbo at Rivendell and at Sam in Mordor:

Slowly [Frodo] drew it out. Bilbo put out his hand. But Frodo quickly drew back the Ring. To his distress and amazement he found that he was no longer looking at Bilbo; a shadow seemed to have fallen between them, and through it he found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him. 

(FR 2.i.232)

and:

'No, no!' cried Frodo, snatching the Ring and chain from Sam's hands. 'No you won't, you thief!' He panted, staring at Sam with eyes wide with fear and enmity. Then suddenly, clasping the Ring in one clenched fist, he stood aghast. A mist seemed to clear from his eyes, and he passed a hand over his aching brow. The hideous vision had seemed so real to him, half bemused as he was still with wound and fear. Sam had changed before his very eyes into an orc again, leering and pawing at his treasure, a foul little creature with greedy eyes and slobbering mouth. But now the vision had passed. There was Sam kneeling before him ....

(RK 6.i.911-12)

No one, as far as I can recall right now*, has remarked on what might be another instance of this same phenomenon. To be sure, it is easily overlooked, embedded as it is within Frodo's reaction to Boromir's actual attempt to seize the Ring. By contrast, Sam was not trying to take the Ring, and Bilbo, though yearning to see and touch the Ring again, reads Frodo's reaction and repents of even asking to see it so quickly, that it's hard to see his reaching for the Ring as hostile. Consider the following:

His fair and pleasant face was hideously changed; a raging fire was in his eyes.

and

Terror and grief shook [Frodo], seeing in his thought the mad, fierce face of Boromir, and his burning eyes.

(FR 2.x.399-400)

So, perhaps we should see Frodo's perception of Boromir's face here in the context of his clearly Ring-induced perceptions of Bilbo and Sam, and allow that the image of Boromir's face that Frodo had in his mind was not entirely accurate. For, if Frodo sees threats to the Ring where there are none and momentarily perceives those he loves as evil creatures, will he not experience the same distortion of his vision when the threat is real, as it is with Boromir.

________________________________________

* Please let me know if someone has made this comment before. I would love to see it.

Review: Tehanu

Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don't have enough stars.

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