On my drive back up from SC this last time, I was listening to old CDs, and Virtute the Cat Explains her Departure came up in the rotation. I adore that song, but it makes me cry every single time. It is sad and beautiful and deep somehow. I believe the word I'm looking for is pathos, a word that gets a bad rap these days.
I think it's actually a pretty great word, a useful word to describe an essential part of the human experience. Pathos is defined as a quality that arouses compassion, pity, or sorrow. When I think about pathos, I think most about sorrow, the kind of sorrow that's universal. Same root as empathy, sympathy, apathy, and pathetic. I wish pathetic had retained more of its original meaning of being moving, stirring, or affecting. I need a word that means that without sounding well, pathetic, because I feel this all the time. I enjoy feeling this (in balance with other things), but I especially love when something touches me, makes me feel this, makes me feel like someone else has felt this.
For me, this so often comes from music, and that identification is so important, so universal, and one of its most powerful forms is pathos. The sense that the world is a sad place, and that the sadness is both more and less tragic because it is inevitable. The story of Virtute the cat sounds like the saddest breakup song ever. He sings, "I can't remember the sound that you found for me" and every loss I've ever felt overwhelms me. That sense, not only of loss, but of being lost, of knowing there was a place you belonged, and you wandered away from it, and now it's lost. In this case, it's all the worse because she's a cat. A human should know better, should remember, should find their way back, but she can't. She's a cat. And then you feel like a cat because sometimes you can't help it, you can't know better, can't find your way back. Then you realize you don't know what you want to go back to because you can't remember it. That's pathos.
I think it's actually a pretty great word, a useful word to describe an essential part of the human experience. Pathos is defined as a quality that arouses compassion, pity, or sorrow. When I think about pathos, I think most about sorrow, the kind of sorrow that's universal. Same root as empathy, sympathy, apathy, and pathetic. I wish pathetic had retained more of its original meaning of being moving, stirring, or affecting. I need a word that means that without sounding well, pathetic, because I feel this all the time. I enjoy feeling this (in balance with other things), but I especially love when something touches me, makes me feel this, makes me feel like someone else has felt this.
For me, this so often comes from music, and that identification is so important, so universal, and one of its most powerful forms is pathos. The sense that the world is a sad place, and that the sadness is both more and less tragic because it is inevitable. The story of Virtute the cat sounds like the saddest breakup song ever. He sings, "I can't remember the sound that you found for me" and every loss I've ever felt overwhelms me. That sense, not only of loss, but of being lost, of knowing there was a place you belonged, and you wandered away from it, and now it's lost. In this case, it's all the worse because she's a cat. A human should know better, should remember, should find their way back, but she can't. She's a cat. And then you feel like a cat because sometimes you can't help it, you can't know better, can't find your way back. Then you realize you don't know what you want to go back to because you can't remember it. That's pathos.
Comments