The News: A User's Manual

Accident

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A father taking his daughter to school in Derbyshire has been killed after his car skidded into an icy river, only minutes before his wife, on a school run with their son, also crashed into the water. The two children and their mother managed to escape unhurt from the cars but, despite desperate attempts by local residents, the father could not be saved and died in hospital. He had been driving along a bridle path north of the A6 in Derbyshire, when his Toyota Aygo veered off the path and became submerged in the River Wye.

Huffington Post

1.

IT IS, OF course, an appalling story. The dead man was only forty-two; friends remembered him as a ‘wonderful, loving father, husband, brother and son’. To shock us further, the news story goes on to give details about the family’s frantic struggles in the freezing river; it describes neighbours’ failed attempts to rescue the driver from the overturned car; and it reveals the parents’ fateful last-minute decision to take this treacherous narrow road rather than their usual (safer, wider) route. It needed just a little patch of black ice for a life to be destroyed. It might so easily have been simply another ordinary morning. The crash dominated the headlines in Britain for several hours one January day (until a plane exploded into flames just after take-off in Nepal).

The disaster belongs to a second, equally compelling and popular category of bad news which is distinct from tragedy in that here there is no one in particular to blame. The causes of calamity lie not with any psychological factors or disturbances within the minds of the protagonists but simply with our species’ vulnerability to mishap, with the extreme fragility of our constitution and the unpredictability of nature. We are reminded that we are only ever a rogue spark, a tenacious germ, a loose tile or a strong gust of wind away from the end.

2.

ONCE AGAIN, THE surface paradox is why we should be so interested in these stories of accident, when it might be logical to presume that we would more naturally be nourished by happier tales; that courage to continue with our own lives would best be fostered by exposure to the positive and resilient aspects of experience.

Though the benefits of good news may be obvious when it comes to our own lives, they clearly don’t apply when it comes to hearing about others’. There is a peculiar, though undeniable, benefit to be found in exposure to the sufferings of strangers.

This may be because we are all, somewhere within us, uncomfortably sad and disappointed. We harbour, quietly, a lot of darkness. At the same time, we live in societies that ceaselessly promote images of ambition and happiness, of thriving relationships, lucrative careers and successful endeavours, most of which lie painfully out of our reach.

It is the persecutory impact of these images of fulfilment that news of disasters helps to alleviate. The crashes, cancers, explosions and fires relativize our own failures. Disaster bears within it a broad and helpful message: humanity suffers. It is this moral that our unconscious apprehends and applies to the particulars of our own griefs (which may be nothing graver than the rejection of a business proposal or a slight to our ego dealt out by an enemy). The differences in proportion between our difficulties and the accident victim’s may seem obscene, but they are also (privately) supremely useful. The exaggerated scale of the pain that someone else has to endure serves to put our problems in perspective. We stand to feel a new gratitude for certain basic privileges that we lost sight of in our envious or frustrated moods. Whatever our disappointments, we have not just had a relative die in a car crash, we have so far avoided contracting a fatal virus and our house is still standing. Immersing ourselves in accounts of misfortune can enable us to adopt a more constructive and generous attitude towards ourselves and others. The growth of tolerance and a measure of hope may paradoxically be fed by news of extreme sorrow.

3.

HORRIFIC ACCIDENTS SIMULTANEOUSLY serve a refocusing function. Most of what upsets us from day to day is disconnected from what ultimately gives our life its meaning – and yet these stresses absorb our energies with vicious intensity nevertheless. Vivid reminders of mortality call our prosaic obsessions into question. When measured against our limited timespans, the true insignificance of some of our concerns is emphasized and our narcissistic, frivolous tendencies can cede to our more sincere and purposeful sides.

News of accidents humbles us into acknowledging that, if life is as fragile as this, if we really have no guarantee that there are decades left ahead, then we don’t want to be people who spent an afternoon arguing with a beloved, who refused to forgive a friend for a minor transgression or who neglected a genuine talent in favour of an unhappy sinecure. The thought of death has the power to rearrange our priorities, returning to the surface the more valuable parts of us which have a tendency to get submerged in the everyday struggles. Evidence of what there is really to fear has the chance to scare us into leading our lives as we know, in the core of our being, that we properly should.

The notion that the thought of death should be able to restore meaning to our lives has a long history. For centuries in Europe, the studies and bedchambers of the powerful were routinely decorated with a human skull, a real or a painted one, which was prominently positioned to catch one’s eye and could usefully interrupt one’s train of thought as one plotted petty revenge against a rival or prepared to betray a lover.

Philippe de Champaigne, Vanitas, c. 1663.

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Woman Killed Instantly by Falling Tree Branch

A New Zealand-born accounts manager, Erena Wilson, received ‘non-survival head injuries’ after being hit by a Lebanese cedar branch blown off by a gust of wind in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, south-west London, on Sunday. She was walking through the popular tourist attraction with two friends when she was suddenly struck. The friends of the 31-year-old described hearing a loud ‘crack’ before realising a branch was falling. They fled but when they looked behind, they saw Miss Wilson lying on the ground. Despite paramedics battling to save her, she was pronounced dead at the scene. Her family said they were ‘very saddened’. Her colleagues paid tribute to a ‘star’ with a bright future ahead of her. ‘It is difficult to put into words how we all feel following the tragic passing of our colleague and friend Erena Wilson,’ said Gez Lowry, a Human Resources manager at the company where she worked.

Daily Telegraph

The news offers us the opportunity to use its grim stories as our own, modern version of these skulls. It would help if these stories could even be laid out under the title ‘Vanitas’, so that there would be no doubt as to what moral we were meant to draw from them. They would then cease to be merely records of private pain and could instead help us to embark upon the far more important task of living in accordance with our true talents and interests in whatever precious moments we may have left before a falling tree branch calls time on us.

4.

THEN AGAIN, WE should be careful not to let others’ dramas work a contrary and less helpful effect on us. Rather than prompting us to focus on our own neglected priorities, these stories can also risk distracting us from our deeper concerns. The scale, colour and immediacy of disasters in the news gives them the power to elbow themselves to the forefront of our consciousness, where they insistently squat, demanding updates every ten minutes (which the news duly obliges us with), thereby obscuring the call of all those far quieter yet for us far more consequential worries which we need to face within ourselves. When a plane has just crashed in Nepal, we may reflexively start to respond in the manner of an air accident investigator or a panicked relative, rather than remember that this is not in fact really any of our business – and that we ought more fairly to be spending the day looking within, trying to interpret those faint pulses of anxiety upon which the effective management of our selves depends.

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Nepal Plane Inferno

A plane flying 19 people towards Mount Everest went down in flames on the outskirts of the Nepalese capital Friday, killing everyone on board including seven Britons and five Chinese, police said. The twin-propeller Sita Air plane had just taken off from Kathmandu and was headed to the town of Lukla when it plunged into the banks of a river near the city’s airport around daybreak. Witnesses described hearing the screams of passengers and seeing flames coming from one of the plane’s wings moments before it hit the ground, while airport authorities said the pilot had reported hitting a bird shortly after take-off. ‘We could hear people inside the aircraft screaming, but we couldn’t throw water at the plane to put out the fire because we were scared that the engines were about to explode,’ said Tulasha Pokharel, a 26-year-old housewife who was one of the first on the scene.

Agence France-Presse

A balanced life requires a curious combination of inner and outer concern: we have to internalize the general message that emerges from others’ accidents – that we are highly fragile and temporary – without, however, getting so deeply immersed in their particulars that we allow the disasters of strangers to become excuses or means by which we avoid our responsibilities to ourselves. We must both register and yet at the same time not fixate upon the sadness and pain with which the news seeks to confront us at every turn.

We are so used to equating being human with the simple act of feeling that we are apt to lose sight of what a necessary achievement it is occasionally to remain numb. Such are the limits of our own concentration and emotional resources, having a serious and appropriate concern for ourselves and the handful of people who deeply depend upon us must frequently involve a calculated restriction of sympathy for, and interest in, others – a due recognition, in other words, not at all psychopathic in nature, that whatever the news may suggest and however immediate, alarming and touching its tales can be, the problems it raises are not always our own.