Sonia by Francisco B.

Icasiano
PAIN, I have realized, is beautiful only when one
can rise from its depressing power. I have known
people who have become bitter and cynical
under the lash of sorrow; and I have known
some who never recovered from anguish. My
experience is important only so far as it may help
others toward growth; it is worthless to me if it
implies vanity.

Sonia to me is a fairy tale half told or a lyric half

lost in fancy, a delicate melody unsung. Had she
grown into full womanhood, she might have
become an intellectual; for she was deliberate
and clearcut in her language, precise in her
reasoning, and keen in sensing nuances which
maturer minds about her could not appreciate;
then I should have remembered her as reason
grown into wit and perhaps into philosophy, but
the impression of a fairyland would have been
forever lost, the glamor of its poetry never felt
even in vague suggestions, and the delicate
melodies never perceived. As a friend suggested
to me when grief was most oppresive: "You shall
always remember her as a child." How beautiful I
felt it was! For nothing but poetry could give such
a feeling. In such a moment, reason would have
destroyed me with consummate triumph; for if I
had tried to explain why God had snatched away
from me the thing I loved best in life, I would
have allowed reason to rob me of sorrow to
show me the way to a more beautiful, more full,
and nearly perfect life. Sonia shall always live in
my memory as a child who wonders why the
stars shine in the sky and the rain drops from
heaven and the grass grows on the wayside; as
a child who finds all things pure and true in her
innocent eyes. I shall look in those eyes and see
so much confidence and faith when I feel that I
am losing my own faith and confidence. I shall
draw from my memory of her a child's
enthusiasm for life when my heart is heavy and
my eyes are dim with age. This is my ideal; to
see the whole of life with a mind mellowed by
age, through a heart of forever young, wise, and
happy!

Days before she died, I had a premonition of her

death, but I dismissed it, consoling myself with
the thought that if such a thing should come to
pass - heaven forbid! - I should perhaps be
rewarded by becoming a true, sincere, and
humble artist through the suffering that would
come from such a shocking experience. For the
first time in my life, the idea of becoming an artist
suddenly lost all its charms. I would rather
remain obscure than lose my greatest
masterpiece, wrought in my own blood, and
polished by the greatest love that I was capable
of giving. Like the reeds in the river, I would
rather keep my leaves and flowers than be cut
up by the great god Pan into a flute. The modest
melody of the mind was enough for me as I bent
rhythmically with its blowing; I would refuse the
greater melody of art that exacts so much.

But when her hour came and the blade of death

cleaved through my heart, I felt as if I too had
died and a new soul had emerged, more
beautiful because cleansed of all bitterness. How
true it is, as poor Oscar Wilde wrote that
"Pleasure is for the beautiful body but pain for
the beautiful soul." But what costly knowledge
this is! Experience has indeed taken away more
than it has been able to give.
It has suddenly occurred to me that the real artist
is measured by his ability to utilize misfortune in
recreating the soul. I say "recreating," because
art is the recreation of life and experience into
that which best soothes and ennobles the soul. If
a man with any artistic pretensions allows sorrow
to destroy him, he is a mere artisan incapable of
producing anything of worth; for the first thing an
artist must recreate, before true art can be
realized, is his own soul.

Moreover, sorrow must crush ere it can reshape

the man in a mold of glory. The reed must have
been cut to pieces, and holes bored through it,
before it can have produced such magic
melodies that at their sound,

The sun on the hill forgot to die,

And the lilies revived, and the dragonfly
Came back to dream on the river.
Before an artist can sweetly harrow the hearts of
others, his own must have bled. There is a story
told of an ambitious singer who thought he would
sing for the grand opera. He sang before a
celebrated maestro who, in the middle of an aria
from Rigoletto, thundered out, "Enough! Enough!
This will never do. Your heart has not been
broken."
In De Profundis, Oscar Wilde made the following
analysis of sorrow in its bearings upon art:
Truth in art is the unity of a thing with itself: the
outward rendered expression of the inward: the
soul made incarnate: the body instinct with spirit.
For this reason there is no truth. Other things
may be illusions of the eye or the appetite, made
to blind the one and cloy the other, but out of
sorrow have the words been built, and at the
birth of a child or a star there is pain.
Indeed, was it not Zeus' head split open with an
axe that Athene might spring full-grown from it?
Besides sorrow's power of giving birth to art,
there is another blessing which must come with
all art and suffering. It is a way of thinking that
solidifies and satisfies, becomes profound and
permanent; a real philosophy of life that grows in
life is, therefore, a creation, an art in itself, and
not the mere adoption of some powerful, second
hand outlook that always proves worthless when
put to the test.
Feeling that the lower forms of logic would be
useless to me at the time of my deepest sorrow,
I approached life by the highest route, through
"the deepest voice of human experience"-
religion. Early the next morning after Sonia's
death, God's hand rested upon my shoulders.
On previous occasions, the mere suggestion fo
her death would drive me into imagining a
sudden flight to some distant land, I knew not
where, for an obscure place where I might forget
or die. But that morning, I felt strangely calm. Not
the remotest shade of thought about running
away from my sorrowing family. Goethe's lines.
Who never ate his bread in sorrow,
Who never spent the midnight hours -
Weeping and waiting for the morrow,
He knows you not, Ye heavenly Powers.
live in my memory, I had eaten my bread in
sorrow. I had passed the night weeping and
watching for a more bitter dawn, and I felt the
touch of the Spirit upon my being.
I went to the church of St. Ignatius in Intramuros
where, humbled by sorrow, I sought the Lord's at
the confessional. I offered up my Sonia, and also
my two other boys, and even my own life if He
desired to take back His own. The pagan protest
that was surging in my bosom I painfully quelled.
It is difficult to give up the things we hold dear on
earth. But when Sonia, whom I loved best, had
been given up, to what could I not be resigned? I
felt that I had grown generous even to
magnanimity. I had ceased to fear for my future,
and I was no longer vain - I gave up all silly
notions of fame, and I became myself.
But what is better, I was born to a greater
realization of truth, a fuller feeling of freshness -
my new philosophy doubtless had given me a
new sense of values. The things I had held dear,
in common with other people, I discovered to be
glittering tinsel and hollowness. We find
ourselves only after we have lost everything we
hold dear in our temporal habitation: we find our
souls only after we have divested ourselves of all
the flummery of the flesh. For indeed, how can
we find our souls when we are wrapped up in
matter so that we cannot take a step, or put out a
hand, or lift up our eyes, but material things are
all about us, following us even to our dreams?
People say something pleasant to us, and
though it be but "hot air," it is enough to puff us
up. We would feed our souls upon vanity and
know not it is a Barmecide feast. Could we but
strip ourselves of pride and vanity, things would
fall back into their proper places, and we should
see the hidden harmony of creation and pierce
through the things that alone are seen of the
world to those that are unseen, setting no store
by these fascinating shadows, even before the
time when they crumble away and vanish into
naught, as all worldly things must, soon or late.
The Worldly Hope men set their Hearts upon
Turns Ashes-or it prospers; and anon
Like Snow upon the Desert's dusty Face,
Lighting a little hour or two- is gone!
The climax in this grand ascent of sorrow is the
perception of reality. When in moments of
devastating grief, my being seemed consumed, I
treid to deceive myself by pretending that it was
all a dream and I would wake to find Sonia's
death a mere fancy; the forced illusion would
always vanish and a newer; more vivid, more
convincing, more permanent if painful realization
would reveal to me that the whole of human
experience this side of Eternity is nothing but a
dream which, with death, finally comes to an
awakening to the only Reality intended by the
Maker of Life. I am convinced that life in this
temporary habitation is a vague and miserable
dream, a nightmare in which the dreamer is
driven from one pain to another, now frightened
by life, now terrified by the thought of death; until
one realizes that there is in this nightmare a
symbol of the Reality that is coming with the
dawn and the awakening.
This realization of the Reality must make a real
artist of a man. Broken with pain, the soul dies to
be reborn, stronger and more beautiful; enriched
and ennobled by sorrow, the artist in the man
rises above himself; shorn of all fineries and
pettiness- all nonessential, in a word- the artist
flows naturally toward the Infinite whither all
artistic effort must be directed.
Thither must I direct my art. Art to me has
ceased to be careful and artificial. It has become
the natural life of the sou, it is the voice of my
soul crying out to heaven for a vision of Sonia,
pleading for a communion with her. I shall
remove everything about me. When the last
word is written and my hand drops limp and
lifeless by my side, I hope to hear the gentle
patter of little feet and feel the tender touch of
little hands around my neck.
Sonia...