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Life Arts    H4'ed 3/20/15

The Pursuit of Happiness (REVIEW ESSAY)

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In connection with Jesuit spirituality, I feel obliged to mention that the Victorian Jesuit poet Fr. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) wrote some sonnets expressing certain inner experiences that he had had. Literary critics refer to those sonnets as the "terrible sonnets" not because they are "terrible" poetry but because they are about inner experiences that sound like they would be terrible to undergo.

I would say that terrible experiences like those Fr. Hopkins describes await all of us, when we are ready to break through the layer of unhealthy fears that function to protect us from having such terrible experiences, presumably because we are not ready to endure undergoing such terrible experiences.

Now, in Dr. Jung's final book MYSTERIUM CONJUNCTIONIS, mentioned above, he refers to the psychological experience of "bitter waters" (pages 254, 255). I would say that the terrible inner experiences that Fr. Hopkins describes in his so-called "terrible sonnets" express his experiences of the psychological experience of "bitter waters" that Dr. Jung refers to.

In the book GESTALT THERAPY INTEGRATED: CONTOURS OF THEORY AND PRACTICE (1973), the gestalt therapists Erving Polster and Miriam Polster discuss the psychological experience of what they refer to as chaos -- that is, the inner experience of psychological chaos (pages 41-42, 138). I would say that Fr. Hopkins expressed the experience of psychological chaos in his so-called "terrible sonnets."

CONCLUSION

So are you still on your journey through Hell, figuratively speaking, or have you exited from Hell and proceeded on your journey through Purgatory? Or have you exited from Purgatory and proceeded on your journey through Paradise?

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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
 

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