Ender’s Game is possibly my favorite book of all time. Every time I read it I experience something profound, something somehow earth-shattering. It’s not about the outstanding quality of writing and character development (although those don’t hurt, either); it’s the tragedy. The story this book tells is heartbreaking; for it to have happened, even in fiction, leaves you feeling sick in your soul. But it was powerful enough to touch your soul in the first place.
The magic of those tragedies make a story stick with us, get it under our skin so we cannot forget. We seem to be drawn to things like this. Why is that?
Perhaps what is so alluring is the feeling of reckless abandon, of being overpowered by sorrow. A friend of mine once told me that sometimes she just enjoys “wallowing” in it, just allowing herself to feel the sheer force of it. This is something that I can almost understand; we so often shy away from feeling sad to keep up with the expectations of others and ourselves, so that to allow ourselves to freely experience it may be in some way liberating.
But I think it’s more than that. When I was caught up in depression in a bad way, I found a certain thought continuing to crop up in my mind: that I was choosing to be sad all the time. That all of my actions were inexplicably—but deliberately— hurtling into the depressive episodes. It felt like an addiction. Like this thing was damaging my life, but I needed a hit anyway. When we read a sad story or see a sad movie, we are safe from the events that occur. So we are safe to feel sad, so we enjoy it that much more. But, in our own lives and experiences, we are finding ways to enjoy it that are just a little more dangerous.
Why could this be? What pleasure could we find in sorrow? Perhaps It’s the power and intensity of the feeling. Perhaps an emotional low can be just as exciting as an emotional high. The chemicals surge through our brain, eliciting this incredible sensation of misery. How amazing! How enrapturing. How very, inescapably human we are, to feel this emotion that can enfold us in its long arms and carry us into that dark, forbidden place of our own minds. How incredible it is to be alive.
What do you all think? Am I totally off the mark here? Am I just weird and masochistic? Please share your thoughts and experience.
