Contents
Sorrow — a state of extreme sadness, experiencing a great loss.
What is considered a big loss?
Big loss is a very relative term. The less experience a person has, the more easily he can evaluate even the loss of a trifle as a universal loss. “Mom, my toy is broken!” (and total horror…)
How is mourning done?
Grief is a social emotion, inculcated through typical “we mourn” statements and a collective demonstration of how it should be done. In a narrow circle, they usually mourn in silence, stooping, with their heads bowed and their eyes looking at the floor.
The meaning of sorrow
Pluses of grief: Grief instills respect for persons of an authoritative line, attracts to pedagogically useful reflections on death and the meaning of life that people need.
Disadvantages of mourning: Love and respect can be shown in a more active way, such as continuing the work of the deceased. «Love me while I’m alive!».
Knowledge multiplies sorrow
«Knowledge increases sorrow» — this phrase is attributed to King Solomon. There is an opinion that this is not just a philosophical judgment about the futility of human knowledge, but a feature of human physiology. American scientists have discovered an interesting pattern: people with higher education are more likely to suffer from stress compared to people who are less educated. At the same time, people with undeveloped intellectual abilities suffer, although less often, but endure a mental crisis more severely.
world sorrow
World sorrow is a term from literary criticism that denotes a complex of pessimistic moods that permeate the work of some writers and poets of the late XNUMXth and first third of the XNUMXth centuries. It is a literary expression of a certain socio-psychological «ailment», the symptoms of which are: satiety with life, longing and spleen, contempt for culture and society, flight from people, proud self-closure, admiring oneself and one’s longing, «intoxication with thought» and atrophy of the will as a result of relentless introspection, abstract grief about the fate of mankind and despair from the consciousness of one’s powerlessness to change the existing state of affairs. The presence of this disease with certain shades and variants was stated in Rousseau, the young Goethe and Schiller, Byron, Chateaubriand, Senancourt, B. Constant, Nodier, Vigny, Foscolo, Leopardi, Lenau, Heine, Lermontov and others.
Sorrow in Christianity
Sorrow, along with suffering, occupies a special place in the Christian tradition.
“From sorrow comes patience …”, “Without sorrows, we will remain cobblestones, plain, worthless.”
Dionysius Tatsis wrote: “Sorrow is what humbles a person, tears him away from the worldly, reveals his character, purifies his thoughts and exalts him, for he endures grief.”