meaningless meaning

Before getting into King Lear, I wanted to write a reflection on my final or overall thoughts on Hamlet. Mainly Hamlet made me reflect on life as suffering, what it means to suffer, and why humans endure horrific emotional and physical suffering. Many people at our age (of course there are exceptions) have not encountered pain that is chronic, either emotional or physical, but those who have are probably the ones who find it most difficult to explain why we go on living if it means continual suffering—unless possibly they have come out the other side of suffering. And “the other side” is not to say that the pain stops or lessens, but that it ceases to become suffering because we have found a reason for it. In Victor Frankl’s book “A Man’s Search for Meaning” he says something like ‘humans can live with any kind of ‘how’ if they have a ‘why’. What Hamlet never found was a meaning for his pain. Life is unbearable not when it is painful, but when it is meaningless. Grief is not the hardest to endure during the rawest moments of separation following the loss, but during the “unending absence that follows: the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself” (Joan Didion).  If I apply our class’s continual concept of the “the low being closest to the high” then the meaninglessness of life must be close to the meaning of life. Throughout Hamlet I was also continuously thinking about why it is important to develop a tragic sense of life (though I’m not sure it can be developed without experience). Tragedy, in life or Hamlet (same thing?), must help us to understand why we are alive by forcing us to confront life’s meaninglessness and therefore, bringing us as close as possible to the meaning of life.