The Hour of Departure

For most people who find themselves cast out from society or targeted by a capricious social media mob, it comes as a bolt from the blue. They had no warning, and didn’t know that they had stepped on an invisible tripwire that would cause their lives to be dismantled.

I at least had the benefit of knowing this would happen to me. It’s hard to explain why. Maybe it’s because I identify with dissidents and exiles, both in literature and in life. For years I’ve surrounded myself with refugees and asylum seekers who fled communist China after being imprisoned and tortured for their beliefs. In hearing their stories, I wondered how I might have fared in their position: would I have had their fortitude? Could I bear to be hated and lied about, and not give in to hating? What would I be willing to sacrifice in defence of truth? These seemed like important questions, even if literal torture and imprisonment were not in the cards.

I didn’t think it would happen quite so soon, though, and I would have chosen the circumstances very differently. There is nobility in sacrificing for a principle or for a cause that you believe in. I didn’t get to choose what I was publicly destroyed over. Still, I can’t pretend that I didn’t know — especially after I decided to run for political office.

A year ago on this day, I won a nomination to become the conservative party’s candidate for the Alberta legislature in the district of Calgary-Mountain View. The nomination race was gruelling: I had a toddler and an infant at home, and had to leave them almost every night to go door-knocking as temperatures plummeted to -25°C. If that wasn’t enough, I also had a….what should I call him? He was an erstwhile friend and failed political candidate who, for reasons I cannot comprehend, seemed determined to derail my candidacy. That made things complicated.

On the night that I won the nomination, my first call was to the second-place finisher—a wonderful man who I’d campaigned against for five months. He congratulated me on the win, and I told him that I felt only a sense of dread and the terrible weight of responsibility. A seat in the provincial legislature is not a big deal, but hundreds of people had taken time out of their lives to put my name on a ballot to represent them. I took that seriously, and wanted desperately not to disappoint that trust. But the foreboding was something more: it was a vague and inchoate feeling that I was headed to some unknown doom. I told him that his fortunes may prove better than mine, recalling the final lines of the Apology — Socrates’ last words at his trial:

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.

The statement was more prescient than I meant it to be. Little over three months later, the bolt struck (my own Meletus finally got his way) and in the span of about four hours my political candidacy, and life as I knew it, ended. I spent the next month as the target of a mindless hate storm, being denounced and accused in the press of all sorts of heresies that I didn’t commit. People I had never met went on national media to attribute to me hateful and inane beliefs that I don’t actually hold, and to explain why I deserved to be ostracized and driven from the public square. Friends, perhaps fearing that the scandal would be contagious, left me. The conflagration destroyed my career and reputation, maybe irredeemably, because Google never forgets. As a public person, I had been vaporized and condemned to live as a kind of ghost: conscious, seeing everything, yet no longer part of the world. The poet Ovid described exile as a living death, and I can do no better.

But I would be remiss if I didn’t also mention the good parts, of which there are many. The friends that stayed—and the new friendships that I’ve made—are one thing to be grateful for.

Another is that suffering and loss have some inherent redemptive value, whether you think you’ve been treated unjustly or not. This is an indelible part of the human experience, and a profoundly valuable one. Suffering gives meaning to our lives (seriously), making us both more empathetic and more fully human. Without it, we’re just wading in the shallows of life.

Suffering also has a way of focusing the mind on questions of ultimate concern. Like experiences of awe and wonder, it is probably the primary way that we come to apprehend the transcendent and confront our own mortality. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn may have said it best, in one of the most beautiful passages in literature:

What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing…

The sudden loss of worldly interests reminds you of the transience of these things, and the permanence of others. “How little have we lost,” wrote Seneca, “when the two finest things of all will accompany us wherever we go, universal nature and our individual virtue. Believe me, this was the intention of whoever formed the universe […] that only the most worthless of our possessions should come into the power of another. Whatever is best for a human being lies outside human control: it can be neither given nor taken away.”

Which brings me back to Socrates, and the purpose of this blog post, which is only to highlight the few lines that preceded the one quoted above.

Wherefore, O judges, be of good cheer about death, and know this of a truth - that no evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death. He and his are not neglected by the gods; nor has my own approaching end happened by mere chance. But I see clearly that to die and be released was better for me; and therefore the oracle gave no sign. For which reason also, I am not angry with my accusers, or my condemners; they have done me no harm, although neither of them meant to do me any good; and for this I may gently blame them.

Still I have a favor to ask of them. When my sons are grown up, I would ask you, O my friends, to punish them; and I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing, - then reprove them, as I have reproved you, for not caring about that for which they ought to care, and thinking that they are something when they are really nothing. And if you do this, I and my sons will have received justice at your hands.

The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.*

• With apologies to classicists: the Jowett translation might do insult to the Greek, but it’s the first version I fell in love with.