Maybe This Really is Not a Come-Down-From-The-Ledge Story
Questioning your parables
For the longest time, probably since first reading Amy Hempel in college, I’ve long used “The Man in Bogota” as a means of consoling other people as well as myself. “In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried” rightfully gets its shine as the consensus best story in Hempel’s oeuvre and nothing catches so dead to rights that feeling of not quite feeling properly bad enough when someone close to you dies. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime story, a miracle in the articulation of emotions if there ever was one.
But “The Man in Bogota” just hits something. It just HITS. Read the story here but for the sake of providing summaries, here’s a summary that is barely shorter than the real deal:
A woman on a ledge. Another woman imagines herself as the one to talk the woman down. She tells the woman about the man in Bogota, a wealthy man with a heart condition who was kidnapped. While the man’s wife worked on paying the kidnappers, the kidnappers needed to keep the man alive, making him quit smoking, changing his diet and making him exercise every day. When the ransom was finally paid, the man emerged in excellent health. His doctor told him the kidnap was the best thing to happen to the man. “Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story,” the woman imagines herself telling the woman on the ledge. But the woman wants the woman on the ledge to consider what the man in Bogota had also considered:
How do we know that what happens to us isn’t good?
You can see in that last line what is so immediately appealing about the story. It’s both straight to the point and at the same time, possibly profound. Something for the self-help heads and something for the philosophy heads.
It’s also somewhat unimpeachable in its logic. How do we really know what happens to us isn’t good? In a philosophical context — free from any certainty about the afterlife and what happens to consciousness in that afterlife — we don’t even really know if death isn’t good, you know, in that meaning of existence sort of way. If not even death can be qualified as objectively bad, you can see how such a life lesson and consequently having such a perspective on life could confront and recontextualize any bad things that may happen to you. We all need to struggle. Struggle is what gives texture and existential undulation to your life’s narrative. Perhaps the putatively bad things that happen to you are merely part of that struggle, necessary components in the grand schema of your life.
Ultimately though I returned to the story because I’ve been wondering lately about this lesson’s utility. The takeaway is having perspective, “understanding the big picture” ethos. However, it’s predicated on humans ability to persevere and adapt. That is the driver of the ultimate goodness of the bad thing’s occurrence.
The lingering questions being: Is this is a lesson advocating docility? Do the machinations of time ultimately resolve things both good and bad as opposed to any sort of ultimate judgment of existence? Is it possible that the cognizance of this idea ultimately affects the overall goodness of its outcome? Yes, how do we know that what happens to us isn’t good but how should we feel when this knowledge remains perpetually out in front of us?
