....to become larger than life. It is a simple statement of fact. All dramas are dramas and all tragedies are tragedies for they are witnessed, they are observed, they are validated and somehow in this process they transmute into some thing profound and significant. That is what separates misery and suffering on a personal level and a suffering that is seen by many. We can empathise with the pain of others, and those who are suffering are elevated to heroic status and perhaps bear their burden with a little more ease, if I may take the liberty to say so.
In the UK a couple of years back a young woman, the name slips my memory (and here it come back again - Jade Goody), came on the reality show 'Big Brother' and since I am not a follower of this insipid and totally vacuous show I didn't know anything about her till she was diagnosed with terminal cancer after being thrown out of the show. I believe, at the time, she was planning to get married to her boyfriend. The media was captivated by her story, the sheer 'unfairness' of life, the audacity of death to come knocking so early on and thousands of pounds were collected in a trust fund for her young daughter's education. She started writing a weekly column in the paper/magazine I am not sure which one, and that besotted the nation. I wonder if it was easier for her to bear her pain because her feelings, her loss, her tragedy wasn't just felt by her but millions along with her? She assumed a grandeur that the show could never give her, from being disliked she turned to be the favourite daughter of the nation? I don't know.
I suppose Hamlet is Hamlet because we bring him to life, his pain is our pain. The death of people aboard the Bhoja Airline crash was a tragedy as it unfolded in front of the public - an audience.
Would our personal, ordinary and deeper losses take on bigger proportions were they to be witnessed by a larger audience? Is there this very primeval need to see in an another human soul the recognition of that pain and hurt and anger or whatever we are feeling so as to say to ourself that 'I am not mad, I feel like others would do in my position'.
To be brutally honest I would want an audience to my life, I suppose that's where the urge for writing comes from, for all writers - even those claiming to write for themselves - are actually writing the words in the hope that someone else would read them.....somewhere and sometime.
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