Topic 190: The Responsibility of Being Sane

Carol:

“If You Can Keep Your Head”

Rudyard Kipling was popular when the young men of the Ivy League were writing their daily themes in 1915 and assigned the topic “the responsibility of being sane.” They were probably more likely to think about Kipling’s 1895 poem “If” than to worry about driving themselves insane from the responsibility to attain academic accolades and become renowned doctors, lawyers or military officers.  As young men well-schooled in the classics, they would have known the latin derivation of “sane” as meaning simply healthy, of being well in both body and mind.

Kipling’s poem is an inspirational primer for “sane” behavior in the tradition of gentlemanly stoicism. Living in Canada for seven years, I read a lot of Kipling and In high school memorized “If” even though the ending left me out: “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, And—which is more—you’ll be a Man my son!” I love the poem anyway for its emphasis on resilience, forgiveness of the failures of others and acceptance of fate. Two of its lines are written on the wall of the players’ entrance to Centre Court at Wimbledon: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
 

Kipling’s own life was met with “Triumph and Disaster.”  Born in Bombay, Kipling was sent to England at the age of 7 to board with a family for six years. These were such unhappy years that he later would describe the holidays he sometimes spent with his aunt in London as “a Paradise that I verily believe saved me” (source “Kipling Society”).
 

Kipling began writing as a student, his first verses published in the early 1880’s. His most familiar works were written between 1894-1906, and in 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  The Swedish Academy acknowledged some controversy in its choice of Rudyard Kipling, for his use of “coarse language” and slang. However, the presentation speech ended with the following:
 

Kipling has given us descriptions in vivid colours of many different countries. But the picturesque surface of things has not been the principal matter with him; he has always, in all places, had a manly ideal before him: ever to be ‘ready, ay ready at the call of duty’ and then, when the appointed time comes, to ‘go to God like a soldier’ “ (source: Nobel Prize Speech)

Perhaps that notion of duty helped Kipling cope with the  loss of his son John during World War I, reported missing on the Western Front in 1916.

“Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?”
    “None this tide,
    Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
    Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.” (from “My Boy Jack”)

Whether or not “My Boy Jack” (1919) referred specifically to Kipling’s son or to any son lost in war, it epitomizes the same ideals from “If” of resoluteness and pride.
 

The same year John Kipling died in an unknown place, those Ivy League students were scribbling their compositions. How many of them would soon march off to War steeped in the stiff-upper lip tradition of Kipling’s generation, called by a responsibility to maintain their sanity, to protect the well-being of family and country through self-sacrifice? How many of their parents also took comfort in Kipling?

Then hold your head up all the more,
This tide,
And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
And gave to that wind blowing and that tide.

Sources:
All information on Rudyard Kipling and full copies of “If” and “My Boy Jack” are found at the Kipling Society website
1907 Nobel Prize Presentation Speech
        

Megan:

The Irresponsibility of Being Insane

The worst thing to call someone is crazy. It’s dismissive. –Dave Chappelle, 2006.

This is one of the topics we pulled earlier in the year and then threw back into the basket. I can’t speak for my mother’s reasons, but I found fault with the premise of the topic. However, we’re winding down now… only 60 topics left, and there’s no point in throwing it back again. We rarely have topics that require us to tread lightly in order to avoid offending people, I don’t want to brush this off with humorous anecdotes and cartoons.

In this case, I must consider my friends and family members who suffer from mental illness. Trivializing their difficulties is out of the question. And it’s out of consideration for them that I am so offended by the implication that being “insane” is an act of immaturity or irresponsibility. I briefly mentioned this to my mother and she suggested that perhaps we could take a more carefree approach to the ideas of sanity and insanity. So, think of chaos, of children screaming, running around and acting crazy.

Acting crazy.

Our vocabularies are infused with out-dated and offensive terms for mental illness. In England, if someone is acting silly, they are called mental or a head case. Over here, you still hear terms like demented, nutty, psycho, and schizo. I used a thesaurus to come up with that list, which is only a partial selection of the terms we once used for the mentally ill that now describe socially unacceptable behavior. And one of the synonyms listed for Crazy is irresponsible.

On the other hand, it’s pretty much common knowledge that it is not okay to use these terms for someone who actually is mentally ill. Political correctness is often bemoaned as having been taken too far, but as with racist and homophobic language, referring to a person who is mentally ill with the same language that describes unacceptable behavior is the same as saying that person is unacceptable.
 

Obviously, there are arguments to be made about context, and about the constant evolution of the English language. Words that once meant one thing now mean another. Take the word “Gay” for example. It used to mean happy, now it means homosexual, but in other contexts it is offensive. I once challenged a housemate when he used the word derisively. He said, “I didn’t mean gay like Gay. I meant gay like rubbish.” I told him that, while I understood that he didn’t actually believe that the board game he’d just lost was homosexual, using the word in that negative context implied a correlation between homosexuality and garbage.
 

 Setting aside arguments about context and linguistic evolution, I still have a problem with equating Responsibility with Sanity. Linking those words, and by implication, their opposites –suggests that sanity is achievable simply by exerting some self-control. And that is crazy. 

Source:
Look up "Crazy" in Thesaurus.com