Recently, I’ve been reading a chapter on the symbolism of the eye in Jungian psychology from The Self: Quest of Meaning in a Changing World by Renate Daniel, the president of the Jungian Institute. In this text, she returns to one of the oldest symbols in Jungian psychology: the eye — the symbol of the Self, which sees everything.

In many traditions, the image of the “eye of God” appears. Nothing remains hidden before it: neither good nor guilt, nor human error. Today, this image seems to have shifted its place. The all-seeing eye appears less often in religion and more often in technology — in surveillance systems, in data, in algorithms that are moving towards knowing about the humans more than we are willing to admit.

Being seen carries a certain tension between the desire to be known and the instinct to remain ungraspable. Visibility invites simplification, naming, and definition. We need the gaze of another person. We want to be noticed and recognised. And yet, a gaze can also overwhelm us — as if someone were looking into a place we want to protect.

In this context, Renate refers to the Brothers Grimm fairy tale The Sea Hare.

Its heroine is a king’s daughter who, from the twelve windows of her castle, can see everything that happens in the kingdom. Nothing can be hidden from her. Her gaze is absolute. Thanks to it, she maintains power and complete independence. But the price is high.

No man can hide from her, so every man who tries to marry her is found and killed. Omniscience protects her from relationships. The tale reveals something deeply contemporary: where control is absolute, there is no room for encounter.

Only the youngest of the brothers finds a way to hide from her gaze — not through strength or cleverness, but with the help of animals: a raven, a fish, and a fox.

The raven (first attempt — hidden in an egg)

He fetched an egg out of his nest, cut it into two parts, and shut the youth inside it, then made it whole again, and seated himself on it. When the king’s daughter went to the first window she could not discover him, nor could she from the others, and she began to be uneasy, but from the eleventh she saw him. She ordered the raven to be shot, and the egg to be brought and broken, and the youth was forced to come out. She said, for once you are excused, but if you do not better than this, you are lost.

This is one of the most striking images: concealment as return to origin, almost like being placed back into potential rather than visibility.

The fish (second attempt — hidden in the depths)

Next day he went to the lake, called the fish to him and said, I suffered you to live, now tell me where to hide myself so that the king’s daughter may not see me. The fish thought for a while, and at last cried, I have it, I will shut you up in my stomach. He swallowed him, and went down to the bottom of the lake. The king’s daughter looked through her windows, and even from the eleventh did not see him, and was alarmed, but at length from the twelfth she saw him. She ordered the fish to be caught and killed, and then the youth appeared. It is easy to imagine the state of mind he was in. She said, twice you are forgiven, but be sure that your head will be set on the hundredth post.

Here, hiding becomes descent — not just invisibility, but withdrawal into something deeper than sight itself.

The fox (final attempt — transformation)

On the last day, he went with a heavy heart into the country, and met the fox. You know how to find all kinds of hiding-places, said he, I let you live, now advise me where I shall hide myself so that the king’s daughter shall not discover me. That’s a hard task, answered the fox, looking very thoughtful. At length he cried, I have it, and went with him to a spring, dipped himself in it, and came out as a stall-keeper in the market, and dealer in animals. The youth had to dip himself in the water also, and was changed into a small sea-hare. The merchant went into the town, and showed the pretty little animal, and many persons gathered together to see it. At length the king’s daughter came likewise, and as she liked it very much, she bought it, and gave the merchant a good deal of money for it. Before he gave it over to her, he said to it, when the king’s daughter goes to the window, creep quickly under the braids of her hair. And now the time arrived when she was to search for him. She went to one window after another in turn, from the first to the eleventh, and did not see him. When she did not see him from the twelfth either, she was full of anxiety and anger, and shut it down with such violence that the glass in every window shivered into a thousand pieces, and the whole castle shook. She went back and felt the sea-hare beneath the braids of her hair. Then she seized it, and threw it on the ground exclaiming, away with you, get out of my sight. It ran to the merchant, and both of them hurried to the spring, wherein they plunged, and received back their true forms. The youth thanked the fox, and said, the raven and the fish are idiots compared with you, you know the right tune to play, there is no denying that.

The princess, who sees everything, cannot love — not because love is absent, but because nothing is allowed to remain hidden. When, at last, she cannot find him — even from the final window — her world collapses. For the first time, she encounters the limits of her own vision.

The youth went straight to the palace. The princess was already expecting him, and abandoned herself to her fate. The wedding was solemnized, and now he was king, and lord of all the kingdom. He never told her where he had concealed himself for the third time, and who had helped him, so she believed that he had done everything by his own skill, and she had a great respect for him, for she thought to herself, he is able to do more than I.

Our desire to know and to see more and more

Renate sees something profoundly modern in this fairy tale: our desire to know and to see more and more. And yet, the princess who sees everything remains alone. Her gaze, sharpened into control, leaves no room for uncertainty, no space where another person might exist beyond her knowledge. To see everything is, in a way, to defend oneself against the risk of not knowing — and therefore against the vulnerability that love requires. The all-seeing eye becomes an interior wall. “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” wrote Rumi. And so the limit she encounters is not only the limit of vision, but the beginning of something more difficult: the slow recognition that love does not emerge from perfect clarity, but from what we allow to remain unseen, unmastered, and open. As Rilke writes in his Letters to a Young Poet (Letter IV):

“Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect, border, and salute each other.”

What remains unseen is not an obstacle to love, but its very condition.

This is similar to Emmanuel Levinas’s ideas in Totality and Infinity — his foundational philosophical text arguing that the Other always exceeds our comprehension and cannot be fully known or reduced to our categories.

“The face speaks. It is not what it says that is first. The face itself is a command, a saying of Thou which calls me to responsibility… ” (Levinas, Totality and Infinity, tr. Alphonso Lingis, 1969)

What Levinas suggests here is subtle but radical: before we interpret the other person — before we assign them meaning, identity, or narrative — they already confront us with an ethical demand. The face is not an object to be understood but a presence that interrupts our tendency to grasp, define, and contain. It resists being turned into knowledge. In this sense, the face is not something we “see” in the ordinary way at all. It is precisely what undoes the safety of seeing.

To truly encounter another, then, is not to know them fully, but to recognise that we cannot. Their interiority remains irreducible, their life always beyond the reach of our categories. And yet, rather than distance us, this impossibility creates responsibility. We are called not to mastery, but to care, to remain open. This deepens the tension of being seen. If the other cannot be fully known, then being seen is never complete — it is always partial, always inadequate, which makes an ethical relation possible at all. For if we could fully comprehend the other, we might also feel entitled to contain them. Instead, Levinas leaves us in a state of necessary humility: we stand before one another not as finished truths, but as infinities we are responsible for, yet can never fully grasp.

Window. Curtains, a blooming greengage tree. An open window with a view of the garden, a curtain pushed aside, an armchair. There whiteness and green play together. Spring enters with its scent and its gust of air. It is of this spring that I would like to dream in my grave. One can feel that someone was here, left, the curtain slowly parts. That little tree, immaculately white, like a bride for her wedding. Evening looms; May beetles are flying. One must emerge from such a tonality. Papers have various tonalities.

The first spring burst into the room. Light spraying. A mood as if under a mute. Not black in colour, only dark; shapes indistinct. I will give it a silver frame. I am afraid of a golden frame. A flat frame like those used for engravings—it will be like an enlarged coloured print. Spring. May beetles are flying, frogs begin to play. To paint a picture is difficult—devilishly difficult. My little painting in which the conception resides.

Two different tones, from which to emerge toward Spring. I created spring for myself. In the dusk the curtain has no shadows. A good windowsill with a book. May beetles outside the window, a symphony of frogs. Spring. Genesis. I glued a small sketch of flowering trees into the space of the window; I added two sides so that it cannot be detected. When I sprayed it, I lost the tone. I drilled into it and ruined it; it had to be removed from the cardboard. It consisted of three parts. Such a little tree that if someone sneezes, it would scatter. The little tree farther away, and the background strong. The little tree forms itself at once.

Spring. Extraordinary patience. The same subject approached four times with effort. When we compare it with the previous ones, something slightly more is gained. Previously I ruined the sky. (…) The picture is not taken directly from nature; the motifs are close, but not from the window—the painting is composed. Spring through a window that has been pasted in. The first one sawed apart, the second dried: a soft armchair, a coloured rug half worn away, a reddish colour in the dresser, darker panelling from the window, a pink curtain. A modest grey little painting.

Spring. The interior spoiled by a blot above the little tree. I wanted to over-refine it; I should have left the freshness. I stitched it together awkwardly and thus ruined it. One must add sky with clouds.

Symbolic golden Spring does not imitate nature; the flowers, the greengage tree—from memory.

What art is made of? There are many theories; one insists that art imitates life. What are dreams made of? The reality and the supernatural?

All those matters occupy me.

As you have read the beginning, along with some notes on the artistic process of this particular painting by Leon Wyszczolkowski, one of many representatives of European symbolism, what were you thinking? Were you monitoring your thinking? Trying to decide if to carry on or abandon? Or maybe thinking of your own work, or the artistic process you follow? You could be also considering documenting your process. After all, we live in an era when we might soon be asked to prove that what we created is our original work and not a product of a well-trained artificial intelligence. As I was reading an interview with Huraki Mukarami (he hasn’t done many) in which he shed light on writing his own fiction, arguing that his prose is his dreams written, he reminded his listeners that when we dream, we do not separate what’s real from what’s not.

What mothers are made of? The bodies that delivered their children? It turns out that during pregnancy, fetal cells cross the placenta into the mother’s body, a phenomenon known as fetal microchimerism. In effect, we are left with parts of our baby in our body: in blood, bone marrow, and the heart, liver, and even brain for decades, even a lifetime.

And now what is our “wast incredible, extraordinary family of humanity”* made of? This beautiful and vast question leaves no one behind, no one out of the circle.

Evidently not only of bodies, but of invisible crossings.

The illusion many still maintain is that we are self-contained. But the evidence—biological, philosophical, even poetic—suggests otherwise. We are porous, yet fluid beings. Memories enter us. Languages inhabit us. The dreams and visions of others become our own imagination.

Perhaps this is why thinkers, writers, and scientists are compelled to appeal to a nearly lost sense of wholeness. One of them, David Bohm, the theoretical physicist most known for his theory of the implicate and explicate order, believed that fragmentation is one of the great illusions of modern civilisation. Our societies, organisations, and even our sense of self are divided into pieces; yet beneath this fragmentation lies a deeper order in which everything participates in everything else. In his later life, he developed a philosophy of dialogue which grew out of his observation that fragmentation is one of the reasons for the many crises we face as a global society. We have lost sight of the whole and that all living things are interconnected, interdependent and interrelated. This is why Bohm recognised that what we so desperately need is new thinking, and that we struggle to arrive at this new thinking because we do not create the time and space to come together and meet in a meaningful way or create the conditions in which we can allow new thinking, and thus change, to occur.

He, a friend of the Dalai Lama, was a change-maker who, among others, got closer to the intuitions of our ancestors, especially those living in the Far East. The teachings of Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism reveal truths that correspond to the descriptions of quantum physics.

From Buddha to Bohr

Contemporary physics outlines a picture of reality in which all components of matter and physical phenomena depend on one another and are interconnected in various ways. Looking at the structure of the atom, we notice that it is composed, among other things, of electrons that move in spaces around the nucleus.

What an electron is constitutes a true challenge for our minds because it has two — seemingly — contradictory natures: it is a wave and a piece of matter.

In fact, even these concepts do not fully capture its essence, especially since its “behaviour” depends primarily on the situation. In other words, an electron does not exhibit any properties that would be independent of its environment. It is therefore not a “thing” in our usual understanding of that word. Rather, it enters into relations with other particles, weaving with them a complex network of dependencies, ultimately creating the entire material reality.

Niels Bohr (1885–1962), a Danish physicist and Nobel laureate, expressed this in his book Atomic Theory and the Description of Nature in the following words:

“Isolated material particles are abstractions, and their properties can be defined and observed only through their interactions with other systems.”

Werner Heisenberg, a German theoretical physicist and philosopher of science, speaks in a similar tone:

“The world thus appears to us as a complicated tissue of events, in which various connections alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole.”

This relational model is at the same time one of the basic assumptions of Buddhist doctrine: the nature of reality is the interdependence of all phenomena and elements. Nothing can exist independently of everything else. This principle in Buddhism is defined by the term śūnyatā. It is most often translated as “emptiness,” which is rather unfortunate, because our understanding of emptiness is based on the lack of something. Here, however, it is not about lack, but rather about non-substantiality, which at the same time is absolute potentiality — the possibility of the emergence of anything, any phenomenon or form.

Looking at a chair, we say: “chair.” But it is not a chair. We only call it a chair. In the chair there is nothing of “chair-ness,” that is, an internal characteristic that would determine that it is a chair. Its nature is empty, which means that it is conditioned by everything else (that which is not the chair), while in turn conditioning the entire reality.

It is similar with our self, which we treat as a real and separate entity from the world. However, from a Buddhist perspective, this reality is a universal illusion, and our true nature is empty — that is, conditioned by everything that is seemingly not us: our ancestors, other people (even strangers), the elements, or non-human beings.

The illusion of separation

In everyday life, we perceive the world in terms of the separation of various objects from each other, and we cultivate our own sense of independence. Yet both modern physics and the wisdom of the Far East challenge this independence — it is a universal illusion.

Hindus call it māyā — the illusion that accompanies us every day when we are preoccupied with the matters of life. Māyā causes us to identify with our small self and look at the world as if it were composed of other isolated elements. In this way, we see ourselves and our surroundings detached from the common Source. A manifestation of this is, for example, identifying with the material body (ahaṃkāra), as well as attachment to possessed things (mameti). Meanwhile, the goal is to break the shackles of illusion and unite with Brahman — the impersonal absolute that is everything that exists. In the Bhagavad Gita we read how Krishna, who is a form of Brahman, speaks to Arjuna:

“Earth, water, fire, air, space, mind, reason, and the sense of individual self — thus is divided My eightfold nature. This is My lower nature. But know My higher nature too! It is the principle of life, O Hero! It sustains this world! Know that from both of these all creatures arise. I am the source of the entire world and its destruction […]. I am the taste of water, O son of Kunti, I am the brilliance of the moon and the sun, the sacred syllable in all the Vedas, the sound in space, the valour of warriors. And the pure fragrance of the earth, and the glow of fire, the life of every creature and the heat of the passionate.”

Nāgārjuna, the 2nd-century founder of the Buddhist philosophy of Madhyamaka (the Middle Way), also shared the view of the illusory nature of our daily perception. For the truth is that nothing has an independent existence. Realising unity is therefore liberation from illusion, an awakening from a nightmarish dream.

Modern physics emphasises that matter is only a manifestation of energy, which, as a quantum field, constitutes the basic physical whole, the constant medium present throughout all space. Particles (forms), on the other hand, are local condensations of the field, concentrations of energy that appear and disappear, thus losing their individual character.

In one of the most important Buddhist texts, the Heart Sutra, we read:

“Form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form; form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.”

In the language of modern physics, this might sound as follows: matter (impermanent forms) does not differ from energy (the field that permeates, creates and connects everything).

It is not easy to understand, because according to our mind, the idea of interdependence and emptiness does not match everyday experience in which we divide reality into separate chunks, attributing to them inherent properties.

Quantum physics and the wisdom of the Far East pose many challenges to our discursive reasoning. Another one is the idea of the unity of opposites.

Opposites are the same

Modern physics indicates that everything has its other side. Fritjof Capra recalls the fact that each particle has an antiparticle with the same mass but opposite electric charge. And so the antiparticle of an electron is a positron; there also exist the antiproton, antineutron, and antineutrino. Even the photon has its antiparticle, although it itself lacks electric charge. The same applies to mesons.

We already know that all matter has a dual nature: it manifests as particles and waves. Their behaviour is difficult to predict — we can do so only by using the concept of probability. There is no certainty that an atomic particle exists in a specific place. Robert Oppenheimer — an American physicist, creator of the atomic bomb — described this paradox as follows:

“If we ask, for instance, whether the position of the electron remains the same, we must answer ‘no’; if we ask whether the position of the electron changes with time, we must answer ‘no’; if we ask whether the electron is at rest, we must answer ‘no’; if we ask whether it is in motion, we must answer ‘no’.” In the roughly 2,500-year-old Upanishads, we read: “It moves and it moves not. It is far, and it is near. It is inside everything, and it is outside everything.”

Is that not a striking coincidence?

We say: beautiful—ugly, good — evil, life — death. These individual categories are connected with human experience of various physical and emotional sensations. Hence our tendency to separate pairs of opposites and to eliminate the part of them that is responsible for suffering. We want life and do not want death; light is good, while darkness evokes anxiety. Here, we can notice how the isolated, frightened self tries to separate certain phenomena from others to feel better and protect itself from difficult experiences.

By realising unity, we make our perception and understanding of seemingly separate phenomena change. What was previously separate again becomes an inseparable whole.

Touching the paradox

This also has consequences for logic, for it turns out that truth includes its own negation. In this way we see how reality resists the possibility of being described, known, and understood by discursive language and a mind accustomed to divisions. Quantum physics reveals to us many such paradoxical truths: matter, which is a form of energy; the vacuum from which everything that exists arises; electrons which are neither particles nor waves; time which is relative… The wisdom of the Far East also contains many similar paradoxes that cannot be understood at the discursive level of the mind. The schools of Zen Buddhism have even made the formulation of such paradoxes into a kind of practice through which the student can experience the one reality and awaken. They are called koans and constitute a true challenge for our intellect.

An example of such a koan is the question: “What was your original face before your mother and father were born?” The “original face” here is a synonym for our true nature. Our self, with which we identify and which has its beginning in the story of our life, is something else. That life appeared through our parents. But who were we before their birth? What did our face look like then? Who are we really if we put aside our everyday identity? All these questions seem meaningless from a common-sense point of view. After all, our life began with birth. We could not have had any face before our parents were born. These contradictions dissolve, however, if we transcend thinking in terms of a separate self and refer to the idea of interdependence and the unity of everything.

Taoism is also full of such paradoxes. Laozi in the Tao Te Ching writes: “Pure whiteness is not without flaw; to possess great Power is not everything; established Power hides indolence; the strongest change their minds; the greatest square has no corners; the greatest vessel has no formed shape; the loudest sound is inaudible; the greatest Image is formless. Tao is hidden and without a name. Without leaving home, one may know the world. Without looking out the window, one may see the greatness of Tao. The further you go, the less you know. Therefore, sages do not travel, yet they know everything. They do not see, yet everything is clear to them. They do nothing, yet everything happens by itself.”

The discovery of the unity of opposites does not mean denying that two poles exist. It is about realising that both ultimately become one. As in the case of breathing, in which inhalation and exhalation are opposing processes, although breathing creates a coherent whole out of them.

Everything is in motion

The process of breathing, like every other, is inscribed in a cycle of transformations. This is another important characteristic of how reality functions, revealed to us by modern physics and once again confirmed in the wisdom of the Far East. Every day we encounter objects that seem hard, motionless and durable, such as rocks or stones. However, these are just appearances, because when we go inside such a “dead” object, we see that it vibrates with energy. Both atoms and the bonds between particles are in constant motion. This movement is associated, among other things, with thermal energy that flows between an object and its surroundings.

Cyclical transformations can be observed in everyday life and on an even larger — cosmic — scale. Motion, which is the fundamental principle of reality, is inscribed in two opposing yet interconnected processes: creation and destruction. In the spiritual traditions of the Far East, the dynamics of transformation and the impermanence of forms are also described as the essence of reality. And so in Taoism, tao means a process embracing everything. Its essence lies in transformations based on the balancing of the elements yin and yang, that is, feminine and masculine energy. Nothing is permanent and unchanging, except for tao itself, whose nature and origin are a great ineffable mystery.

A similar thought can be found in the Hindu metaphysics of Sāṃkhya, which is based on a dynamic balance between the aspects of spirit and matter. In Buddhism, the idea of the impermanence of everything is the foundation of the First Noble Truth, which says that suffering is universal. Everything passes away, which inevitably involves the experience of loss, and that brings suffering. Therefore, we long for permanence, but this only intensifies suffering because it opposes the fundamental rule of reality. Accepting impermanence — that is, giving up the desire to be someone unchanging and independent — leads to liberation from suffering and union with life. Thus, the discovery of one’s true nature and, at the same time, the nature of the universe leads to awakening from the illusion of separateness.

A similar picture of the world can be found in physics. Scientific research increasingly emphasises that the whole of reality should be viewed as a network of relations, which has a dynamic character. It is not a collection of separate, independent entities, but a system of connections forming an integrated whole. According to quantum theory, the material world is a complex and indivisible fabric of events. It also includes the observer and his consciousness. A mystic would say that it is as if the cosmos were looking at itself. In the Upanishads, there appears the famous sentence tat tvam asi, meaning “you are that.” In this way, the division between atman and Brahman, between the human being and God, between the creator and the creation, between the subject and the object, is ultimately transcended.

Today, in times of confusion and instability, we long for a deeper insight into the nature of the world and ourselves. We need new cultural narratives which, based on the discoveries of modern physics, refresh the spiritual insights of our distant ancestors. In these stories, the world is a whole, and everything that exists is an aspect of ourselves. We must recognise that we are all connected, and that every smallest step we take echoes throughout the whole of reality. By observing the world, we have the opportunity to discover who we ourselves are, because its nature is our nature. This is an important lesson on the road toward realising our own wholeness, in which — as a Buddhist saying goes — “a drop of water protects itself from drying out by merging with the ocean.”

I wish to end this eclectic article with a poem by Mary Oliver:

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

In the family of things.

*P. Neruda

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“For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Isn’t it interesting that what we understand as honesty in speaking or writing comes less from superabundance of vitality and more often from an unspoken need to be reassured? And of course, we all want to be received well. We believe some people will be interested in what we said, imagined, clarified, thought: that someone will nod, at least once, will understand, even if slightly, and will not put down what ours after the first paragraph.

In this regard, even silence might be staged against the possibility of being heard. Language is relational; it exists because there is “an other”, even if that other is us at a different stage. Perhaps the impulse to speak is not pure expression, but contact, the opposite of isolation.

We choose certain words over others. We reveal something. Why? Because we want to be seen — but safely. We want to attract. We want to be understood without being totally dismantled. We speak because we long for a response, a laughter, a reflective silence. We write because we want the echo.

And there is SADNESS…

When we are deeply sad, speech might feel excessive. Words seem too solid, and the modern language proves to be insufficient. We draw, we paint, we compose songs. We have a long history of expressing that complex state of sadness.

Isn’t it interesting that in the modern world this what is expressed globally as tristesse or tristezza or saudade in its rawest form, renders us unattractive and needy?

True, Tristesse could name a person, in which case, the Arthurian knight from the “Tristan and Iseult” legend would be a deeply complex and tragic figure. Rarely, though, someone is just sad all the time in that kind of romantic taking.

When Françoise Sagan titled her novel Bonjour Tristesse, she greeted sadness as if it were a familiar presence. Not an intruder. Not a catastrophe. Something that walks beside a human.

And then there is that untranslatable Portuguese saudade — not simply longing, not exactly nostalgia. Presence of absence, perhaps. A fullness shaped like what is missing. In Portuguese love poetry and in the songs of Amália Rodrigues, the queen of fado, saudade is a second heartbeat.

I find it fascinating that in my mother tongue, in popular phrases, sadness can literally be a “guest” on someone’s face, whereas the same expression in English would simply be translated as “keeping” a long face. Sadness would have a power to “overcome” a person, but could also be “shared”.

While I cannot dig as deep into many roots at the same time, I can talk about some old fragments. Let’s start with something that will put off a standard reader straight away — sins! To begin with the origins…

A sad monk does not know spiritual delight, just as one burning with a strong fever does not know the taste of honey; a sad monk will not stir his mind to contemplation, nor will he raise a pure prayer, for sadness is an obstacle to every good” — wrote Evagrius Ponticus, including sadness in the catalogue of peccata capitalia (capital sins).

The theologians believed that this vice arises in two ways — first of all, when anger subsides, and a person feels that they have suffered some loss, and is also unable to analyse their aspirations and desires. Sadness may also arise “from some incomprehensible dejection of our mind or from doubt.”

Each time, however, in the opinion of the medieval Desert Fathers, an excess of sadness generates laziness, that is,

the sin which “overcomes us with sleep in the heat of the day” or “encourages us to leave the cell.”

Interestingly, in the thought of the thinkers of that era, the explanations of the fifth capital vice — tristitia (sadness) — and the sixth — acedia (laziness) — were often very similar.

It should therefore not be surprising that the catalogue of peccata capitalia (capital sins) known to us, proclaimed at the beginning of the 7th century, does not contain the name sadness. This vice was incorporated into the last of the capital sins, namely into the sin of laziness. This does not change the fact, however, that sadness and laziness throughout the entire history of the Catholic Church were connected by a fairly strong semantic bond. This kinship can also be observed in old Polish lexis I will be referring to.

The observations show that within the lexical-semantic category of SADNESS, various units had differentiated positions. Some were located in the very centre, others appeared on the boundary of such fields as, for example, LAZINESS or ANGER. Eight words: smutek (smętek), ckliwość (cliwość), tęskność, tęsknota, tęskliwość, żal, żałośćand żałoba oscillated around three groups: the so-called “sadness” group; the so-called “laziness” group, containing names of what is understood today as professional burnout; and the so-called “anger” group, that is, a collection of lexemes meaning ‘complaint, grievance.’

The “sadness” group

The lexeme smutek reaches back with its roots to Proto-Slavic. It derives from motiti, motǫ ‘to mix, to stir, to bring about confusion.’

On Old Polish ground, this verb took the lexical form mącić (męcić), while its content underwent expansion. Apart from the primary sense ‘to disturb,’ the word mącić also meant

‘to make turbid, non-transparent, to pollute, to stir up, to shake.’

Around the 14th century, as a result of metaphorical analogy, consisting in associating the disturbance, the muddling of seemingly ordered matter with behaviour that is domineering, even aggressive, on the part of those holding power, new figurative senses of that verb were generated, such as ‘to oppress, torment, trouble, persecute.’

At the same time, prefixed derivatives of mącić, i.e. smącić and smęcić, also acquired metaphorical content. Primarily,

they named the action of setting something in motion, mixing, stirring, whereas secondarily, the action of a subject that is the cause of worry, thus ‘tormenting, saddening’ others.

Based on these prefixed verbs, around the 14th century smętek emerged, giving rise to the word that the nation now recognises as “sadness.”

In Old Polish dictionaries, this lexeme appears in the meaning

‘affliction, dejection, ailment,’

although some recorded examples introduce other contents, such as ‘a violent outburst of despair’, e.g.:

“Bloody drops fell to the ground, and in this he showed his great smętek,”

or the feeling of hopelessness caused by the loss of hope, e.g.:

“Saint Michael showed him (Saint Paul) a flame where there were light and darkness, smętek and weeping and heavy sighing”; “But today is for all people a time of smętek and sorrow.”

The second of the cited senses is semantically close to the content of the offence tristitia ‘sadness, powerlessness, lack of trust in God’s mercy.’

The examples recorded are not entirely clear enough to state with certainty the presence of the meaning ‘to sin by sadness,’ nevertheless other, later fragments give such conviction, e.g.

“As a moth to a garment and a worm to wood, so sadness…”

The cited excerpts refer to the treatises of Evagrius Ponticus, who, writing about sadness, sometimes used the metaphor of a moth or (at other times) a worm destroying a still living plant, e.g. “The worm of the heart is sadness and it devours the mother who gives birth to hope.”

This does not mean, however, that the aforementioned Old Polish fragments denied the presence of the apology of sadness and suffering known to us. The majority of the texts recorded at that time suggest that sadness was also experienced by virtuous people.

At the turn of the 18th century, one still reads:

“The heart of the wise is where sadness is, the heart of fools where there is joy.”

Thus in the Middle Polish period one can observe that the glorification of pain and sadness was still perceptible, and they were by no means considered in categories of sin. The situation changes at the beginning of the 19th century, as evidenced by the dictionary entry in Krasiński’s dictionary:

“Sadness gives an idea opposite to joy and denotes an uncheerful state of the spirit in which sighs involuntarily break from a constricted heart and a person feels more inclined to tears than to a smile.

It may be painted on the face, in the eyes, in the voice, it may even be harmful to health, but it itself is not physical suffering, for the body cannot experience sadness.”

The cited fragment contains no elements suggesting praise of grief and torment; on the contrary, Krasiński in the definition, provides the previously cited excerpts, treating sadness as the name of the sin tristitia. In turn, later dictionaries characterise the examined name in a dichotomous manner; the quotations included introduce, on the one hand, the sin of sadness, on the other, the trait of pious people. It even happens that paradoxically, it becomes the virtue of hope, e.g.

“Most often sadness walks with hope”

In later lexicons, sadness is defined neutrally, without emotional (or religious) marking, as ‘a joyless, dejected state of mind; worry, affliction, vexation.’

The “laziness” group

Extremely interesting seem the units forming the so-called “laziness group.” In old Polish these lexemes meant

‘sadness caused by lack of willingness to perform work, to undertake intellectual effort, also to pray’

(in devotional literature one speaks of ‘spiritual lukewarmness’). In some old texts, however, it is impossible to determine whether the mentioned elements implied the sin of acedia, understood as a kind of burnout, that is, exhaustion of strength, zeal, also talent, or rather served to describe the symptoms of a state — namely chronic fatigue, irritability, permanent sadness, a feeling of lack of meaning and purpose in life (the sin tristitia).

Such a difficult-to-resolve situation is encountered when analysing the meanings of the names that all relate to tenderness (ckliwość, tęskność, tęskliwość, tęsknota, tęsknica). They derive from the Proto-Slavic adjective toskъnъ‘sorrowful, sad, dejected,’ thus etymologically they are connected with the lexical-semantic field of SADNESS. According to Polish etymological dictionaries, one of the oldest lexemes of this group was formed from the adjective, which in turn was created from cnić ‘to long, to feel displeasure.’ Initially this name was associated exclusively with bad physical condition caused by nausea, e.g. “With this inflammation, cliwość and swelling of the belly come upon weakness,” however already in the mid-16th century, most probably as a result of analogy to the newly formed verb cknąć ‘to be in a bad mental state, to rebel inwardly,’ ckliwość began also to mean (besides ‘sentimentality, excessive tenderness’) the sin tristitia, that is, ‘mental suffering, spiritual collapse.’ Traces of such conceptualisation can still be found in some fragments:

“Misery and ckliwość of life cause heaviness, distaste and unwillingness toward everything.”

Later dictionaries give as an old synonym of that word the lexeme that became the archaic name of laziness.

Slightly different contents were carried by the nouns tęskność, tęskliwość and tęsknota. These lexemes were formed on the basis of the verb tęsknić to long.

This situation stabilised at the beginning of the 17th century. All lexemes derived from tęsknić were treated as meaning ‘heaviness, weariness, boredom,’ thus as synonymous with laziness. Some quotations, however, introduce another content — ‘sadness’ (the sin tristitia), constituting the consequence of acedia, e.g.

“It is unfitting for a man to feel tęskność, because tęskność is the result of idle laziness”; “To know how to spend time is the essence of life; inactivity, unpleasant, brings longing.”

Interestingly, in the modern Polish period the units tęskliwość and tęsknica functioned as synonyms of ‘boredom, vexation,’ whereas tęskność and tęsknota were connected with ‘sadness caused by separation,’ as evidenced by the dictionary entry:

“Longing denotes some inexpressible longing in the heart, which can hardly live, feeling the lack of that which it loves and for which it sighs.”

The “anger” group

In the “anger” group are placed lexemes derived from the noun žalbъ ‘sadness, regret, suffering, pain,’ most of which arose already in Proto-Slavic. An example of such a unit is žalostь ‘worry, sadness.’ On Polish ground this name (żałość) was characterised by a very broad network of semantic senses oscillating around the old Proto-Slavic meaning. In some uses it implied ‘despair, that is sadness of enormous intensity, often bordering on madness,’ at other times ‘harm,’ also ‘pain, suffering,’ even ‘regret (for sins), contrition.’

In Middle Polish żałość was most often attested as an element of the sacrament of confession (e.g. “Pain or żałość is the torpor of penance”), more rarely meaning ‘sadness’ or ‘grief.’ This state of affairs did not last long — it changed radically from the 19th century onwards, when the word was regarded as a synonym of lamenting, thus an element of the category ANGER. Contents close to the contemporary semantic structure ‘piercing sadness, regret’ are explicitly recorded only later, although much earlier, Jan Kochanowski, one of the prolific writers noted:

“From every corner żałość takes away the man, and his heart seeks its consolation in vain.”

Meanings similar to the formation żałość were contained in the word żal. Although in Old Polish it was recorded less frequently than żałość, one can observe that around the 17th/18th century it named broadly understood sadness, which could take the form of ‘a feeling of dejection,’ ‘remorse, contrition,’ ‘longing,’ ‘compassion,’ also appeared in the form of ‘trouble,’ ‘pain,’ even ‘resentments and grievances,’ which placed żal on the border of the category of the sin ira(anger).

At the beginning of the modern Polish period, however, the meaning ‘longing’ becomes increasingly frequent and dominant.

A slightly different history was borne by the lexemes żałoba and żałobliwość, which in the Old Polish period were attested exclusively in fragments indicating the meaning ‘regret for sins.’ This process occurred parallel to the generalisation of meaning observed at the beginning of the Polish Renaissance. At that time, żałoba and żałobliwośćmoved on the boundary of the two fields SADNESS and ANGER, meaning ‘a feeling of unpleasantness’ and — interestingly — ‘complaint,’ e.g. “Bolesław made a complaint before the senators against his brother”; “What complaint do you bring against this man?” Also in Polish official texts of the 17th/18th centuries, żałoba was used in the meaning ‘written grievance,’ e.g. a “letter of complaint”; “Żałoba or complaint should be clear and precise”; “When someone comes wishing to lay a complaint against another…”

Although in the Middle Polish period the content ‘complaint’ was as stable as the meaning ‘grief after the death of someone close,’ in 19th-century Polish the trace of it disappeared. From that time on, żałoba means mourning after the death of a loved one.

And with this understanding, I recommend reading the work of Françoise Sagan, who in her book, alienating the typical mainstream reader, Bonjour tristesse wrote:

A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else…

Above else I was afraid of dullness. ”
― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse

Perhaps that is why, when we are sad, we tend to become silent. Sadness is at risk of being mistaken for flatness. For lack of wit. For the absence of a vital spark.

Dramatic sorrow in some social circles appears even glamorous. But unspoken sadness? Disengagement? Nothing to contribute? Retreat? Monitoring? Am I becoming tedious? Am I dimming the room?

Sagan’s confession is startling because it reveals the vanity hidden in melancholy (not vanity in the shallow sense, but becoming uninteresting, losing the shimmer that makes others lean in). When we fall silent in sadness, we are not always protecting others from our heaviness. Sometimes we are protecting ourselves from being reduced to it. We do not want to be catalogued as the dull one, the gloomy one, the person whose presence lowers the temperature of conversation.

And yet, what if silence in sadness is not dullness at all, but resistance to the masquerade? A refusal to perform brightness. A refusal to make pain entertaining.

The real tragedy is not that sadness makes us quiet. It is that we live in a world where quietness is so easily confused with little worth.