Slow Havamal 70

[kylec]

The 70th verse claims it’s better to be alive than dead, regardless of circumstances. Odin saw a fire burn for a rich man who lay dead outside the home.

Even when life feels a miserable burden, it’s better to stick it out than the alternative—so says Odin in Havamal. The reason he gives is that the living are the only ones who can enjoy anything. Whether death is terrible or something we don’t sense at all isn’t specified, but we can be sure there are no pleasures. If the rare opportunity to enjoy something is worth any pain, we get a good sense of the priorities of life. No one says pain is good, or that we should suffer it with a glad heart. It’s treated like its toll is well-understood. There’s sympathy in the fact that this verse doesn’t make light of pain. It may even be worse than feeling nothing at all.

But joy, even that of a warm fire, is worth the tribulation. After the rich man is laid outside, the hearth keeps burning, and his lavish possession presumably stick around, but he can’t get any more pleasure from them. We get the sense that the bounties of the material world are wasted for one who retires early. The good remains good whether or not someone can rest in its sphere of enjoyment.

This idea contrasts with a few current notions. One is that at a certain point, misery becomes so great that it can’t be alleviated, and that ceasing to live would be preferable. That one is as old as any literature I’ve read. We also have the stoic attitude that pain isn’t really pain, nor is pleasure all it’s cracked up to be. That may be valid to some, but I don’t find it in this verse. I’ve also heard that we shouldn’t live hoping for a better day tomorrow. The present is what we have, and many of our hopes and fears will never come true. That, too, seems to conflict with a verse that encourages us to hold on for dear life, because even a small fulfillment in the future will make it worth the torment.

It’s possible that this is a Norse commoner’s attitude that helps him persevere through difficulty. I suppose the more philosophical mind might think in greater nuance. The average man, though, needs a verse like this to give him some flicker to hang on to, when the alternative would be suicide, drugs, or a wasting away. Let’s assume there is more than a naive truth to it, though.

On the one hand, any joy is great only in contrast to the other experiences of a lifetime. I won’t appreciate a warm fire where I live, because it’s always temperate, but a Norwegian might look on it quite longingly to take the chill from his bones on a dark winter’s evening. Joyful belongs to a class of adjectives called “relative adjectives.” A man who’s never seen an apple can pick out “the big red apple” from a line-up of strange fruits, because he knows “red,” an absolute adjective, though he has no idea if this example is big for an apple or not. But nothing can be tall, warm, or joyful without something against which it contrasts.

Maybe we can see the rich man as one who was metaphorically cast out of enjoyments by taking them for granted. He never lacked a fire and rich clothing, so he was unable to enjoy them. I don’t think that’s what the verse says, but it’s a valid leap. The man who suffers most should hang on, because suffering is the mother of joy. The worse things get, the easier it is for some simple grace to gladden the heart. Those with the least are most easily moved to smiles. If we run from our pain though, we run also from the joy at the other end, the joy which must happen and grows more inevitable with each minute of suffering.

We can also look at joys as a whole. While we experience time and space in sequence, imagine a period of life is a vinyl record on a turntable. We experience the point of the needle, and when a triumphant passage plays, we’re thrilled. But those notes exist only in a continuity with all other notes on the record. We could not have reached them without going through the entire thing, and the more dramatic the twists and turns of the movement, the more powerfully we feel those uplifting measures.

Why would we want to give up early and miss what must arrive soon?

As much as I appreciate the stoics, it’s equally useful to see the ups and downs in all their wondrous detail, so long as we keep the whole in mind, and the necessity of experiencing all parts. Equally, it’s no crime to “look forward to” a better day. It may seem to denigrate this one, and perhaps it does in a certain temporal way of viewing it. But it reminds us that this is a part of that, at the moment we’re most liable to forget. Armed with that realization we can settle back into the present, with its suffering or boredom or bleak prospects, and admire it as we do a dark patch of a painting, a somber movement of a song. Joy alone is felt as monotony, not joy, and it leaves us lying outside the blessings while they glow for others.