'I Will Complain, Yet Praise'

We all know, and try to avoid, that growing population that speaks exclusively in one of two modes: order-giving or complaining. They are toddlers costumed as grownups. Like young children, they can be at once charming and tediously annoying. Even their praise is complaint in disguise. Their world is an unsatisfactory place. Just ask them. “Complaint quickly tires, however elegant or however just,” Dr. Johnson writes in The Rambler #73. Just as my hangnail is more important than your cancer, so does my complaint outweigh yours on the cosmic scales of unfairness.

Not that complaint ought to be banished. You might even suggest that I am complaining about complaint. It is, however, merely one violin in the orchestra. We and the world are more complicated than that. Like the world, we are heterogenous. In Music at Midnight: The Life and Poetry of George Herbert (University of Chicago Press, 2014), John Drury contrasts Herbert’s “Bitter-sweet” with Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: “Its lower key matches the maturity of its acceptance: its ‘yes’ to life. Herbert settles for life’s ambivalence . . .”:    

“Ah my deare angrie Lord,

Since Thou dost love, yet strike;

Cast down, yet help afford;

Sure I will do the like.

                                   

“I will complain, yet praise;

I will bewail, approve:

And all my sowre-sweet dayes

I will lament, and love.”

The world is more than binary, and so are we.