A dear friend let his dog go yesterday., with heart-wrenching pain. We would not wish that kind of soul-tearing on anyone and yet we set ourselves up for it time after time. . Loss is implicit in love:., and yet we deny it. time after time. Love, they say, is deathless and never dies. But love's object dies and then love goes searching, clawing, writhing, howling. twisted and stricken with pain. What is there to say in the face of such torment?I I feel for my friend as I remember my own pain, past now, not as acute, paved over with scar tissue, but still there. There is no comfort, no present comfort, no balm to ease the wound. Only time. Only time can do anything and then it doesn't assuage the pain, it just distances it. For a while. Oh, my friend, what can I say, what can I do? I' am so sorry for your loss. Hang in there, Hold on. Nothing but obscenities. In the Anglo-Saxon poem, Deor's Lament, a warrior who has suffered physical and mental pain and who has nothing left comforts himself with bleak reassurance: "That passed; so may this." I guess.

Does anyone remember Mr. Roberts? I remembered a lot but checked Wikipedia to refresh my memory. The play, based on a collection of stories by the same name, written by Thomas Heggen and adapted by Heggen and Joshua Logan, won a Tony in 1948, starring Henry Fonda. Mr. Roberts was quartermaster of a naval supply ship during WWII, working back and forth between Tedium and Lethargy. with a crew out of its collective mind with boredom. Mr. Roberts kept applying for active service on a warship and when he finally got his change of duty and ship, was killed in a kamikaze attack while sitting in the mess having a cup of coffee. HIs best friend, the doctor on the supply ship, received news of his death and didn't tell the crew. They were so far steeped in boredom that the news would have supplied only a moment of trivial respite from their torpor.

I think that's what's happened to the mass psyche. I am not on Facebook but I get messages from friends and the news when something goes viral: whales caught in ice, a monkey in a shearling coat caught in a store desperately seeking its owner, a flash dance staged in Pushkin Square -- all momentary trivia that catch the mass attention. Frightening, really.