"Nothing is more sad than the death of an illusion." That's a quote by Arthur Koestier. To me, it's obvious that Koestier truly knows nothing about love. Arthur was an author with many books to his credit. His most well-known work was Darkness At Noon an anti-Soviet work. Koestier was married three times during his lifetime and had numerous affairs. He was also alleged to have been a serial rapist, in a book by David Cesarani, in 1998.
While the rapist charge surprised me, his multiple marriages and numerous affairs really didn't surprise me. Neither did the fact that he had a child out of wedlock, which he then refused to have any contact with. The quote above speaks volumes about the man that uttered it. If the saddest thing you can think of is the death of an illusion...and you truly mean it, then it is obvious that the speaker has never experienced love for anything but themselves. Arthur's actions throughout his life also seem to point to his narcissism. He was married three times and yet had numerous affairs. This certainly points to the fact that he had little "love" or empathy for his wives and was instead just looking out for what was "best" for him.. For Arthur, love itself seems to have been an illusion. Real love takes into account the feelings of those you love. Narcissism is a normal condition at the infantile level of personality development. Is there narcissism in sadness? Yes, to some extent there is. When someone we love dies, some of our sadness is due to the fact that we will no longer be able to enjoy that person's company. But usually, there is so many more layers to the sadness. When my wife died, a lot of my sadness had to do with the empathy I felt for my daughters who were now going to experience growing up without a mother. I was also sad because Sharon was not able to beat her addictions... or see the great love that had surrounded her. Was I sad for myself? Sure. I miss my wife dearly. Companionship (without love) is easy to come by though, and my grief had less to do with a loss of companionship than the pain her loss was causing me and my daughters on a deeper level. In all. sadness is due to reality and not illusions. In a sense, we all suffer from illusions. We believe things that we are told or that we see, oftentimes without giving much thought to them. Later, when we actually learn the truth, we may experience some discomfort or sadness. For Arthur, his lack of love for anything or anyone but himself could have made the death of an illusion the saddest thing in his life...which in itself is sad. When Koestier was young, he had been a communist. His views changed with Stalin and the advent of Soviet communism. Could his conversion from communism be the death of his illusion? We'll never really know. Still, I think it is important to look under the illusion of a one sentence quote to see if it can really stand on its own. In this instance, I don't think that it can. There are many illusions in life. Sometimes, love is one of them. Love that you have for someone may not be felt for you by that other person. While that is sad, is that illusion, or reality? To me, the death of what is real is much more sad than the death of any illusion I may hold. What do you think?
3 Comments
Joel Bodine
11/26/2018 10:47:12 pm
Thanks for your words of wisdom dissecting the quote by Arthur Koestier, you let me read a different perspective on a famous quote. Sometimes reality is found by deconstructing illusion and it is always comforting to see it happen with words.
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Amanuel
11/26/2020 10:05:39 am
It gave me a whole lot of perspectives. Thanks
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Dare
8/23/2021 01:19:59 am
The quote doesn't need to be picked apart. It is not just about love. It is just about sometimes everything is beautiful then you take off your rose-colored glasses and see things the way they truly are. You have remorse and cry a little and get back to realism. You can either survive the illusion and move ahead with your eyes wide open or just continue weeping for the loss of what you thought was.
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