What We Call Moving On
Walking lightly and leaving the past behind is often presented as the secret to happiness as Stoics like Seneca urge us to believe, or as the Dalai Lama gently but persistently asks of us. Easier said than done. But is it always the way? Is moving on the only option, regardless of the circumstances?
Not by coincidence, I recently completed two chefs-d’œuvre in this regard: A Little Life and Hamnet. I’ll use both to sit with this difficult emotion we all face, in different degrees, throughout life.
A Little Life, by Yanagihara. Jude goes through a turmoil of emotions and experiences so devastating they almost feel unreal. It makes us wonder whether such a life could even exist today, perhaps in some remote corner of the world, or perhaps right here, in a big city cemented by what we call modernity. I’m not sure. And frankly, I prefer not to think about it too much, because if it does exist, then we have failed miserably. The novel itself is so heartbreaking that it takes ages just to breathe again after finishing it.
Through his harsh yet inevitable life, Jude faces every form of abuse, physical and emotional, leaving ineradicable marks that determine both his mental and physical existence until the very end. One wonders: how much pain can a person endure? The answer is probably simple and unbearable — it depends on who is by our side. Inner strength matters, but when pain becomes too bitter to even taste, surviving on one’s own company feels nearly impossible.
Jude eventually commits suicide after his partner of thirty-four years dies in a car accident, the final cruelty, the last weight added to an already brutal life. It’s easy to fall into judgment and say he was weak. But from my point of view, it was precisely Jude’s resilience, strength, and capacity for love that kept him alive for as long as he lived. He didn’t die earlier because he loved and was loved.
Bringing this back to our own lives, there’s a widespread consensus that therapy is the way out. As if we could all enter therapy and emerge cured, as if pain followed a universal formula. But as the book itself suggests, therapy might be the ointment, not the cure. It failed him, as it has failed many others. The novel leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Is pain or trauma ever truly cured? Or is it simply buried, muted enough for people to resume their lives — as I now resume this text?
On the other hand, Hamnet. A period story set in sixteenth-century England, where the plague takes the life of Shakespeare’s son, who, bravely, almost mythically, trades places with his sister so the angel of death takes him instead. The family is left in disbelief. Grief fractures them. The mother is outward, raw, consumed by emotion. William turns inward. And in doing so, he creates a masterpiece: Hamlet.
That creation becomes the family’s catharsis, the pivot that reunites them through the very pain that kept them apart for years. Not a resolution, but a new beginning.
Neither story offers a happy ending, if such a thing even exists. But both leave us with the same unresolved question, one I cannot answer yet: when emotions are lived so intensely, do they always leave a mark we can only reshape?
Or can we convince ourselves, forcefully enough, to forget just enough to turn the pages of our life’s book and reduce what once devastated us to a picture in a photo album?
