Topic
The collection opens with La Rochefoucauld's precision: old people give good advice because it consoles them for no longer being capable of bad examples. It is the most honest observation in the database about why advice-giving feels necessary and what it actually serves. Austen on friendship as the finest balm for disappointed love has been confirmed by every person who has come out the other side of a heartbreak with their friendships intact. The theological entries — Saint-Exupéry's stars, Dickinson's lamp and dawn — earn their place by being true to the experience they describe rather than falsely reassuring about outcomes. Bacon on imagination compensating for what we are not, and humor consoling us for what we are, is the most generous account of our ordinary human equipment: we are given faculties suited to our actual condition. Gay's widow-and-hope is the black comedy the collection needs when the alternatives are unbearable. What the collection argues is that consolation is not the same as healing. It is the acknowledgment of the wound and the company of others who have survived their own.