Smile
In a moment of unguarded whimsy I downloaded and installed a Charlie Chaplin desktop theme to my PC: the upshot of which being that I now have a rather blocky montage of the man himself on my desktop, my every movement is heralded by a burst from the Tramp’s nonsense song from the end of Modern Times, as if it were my leitmotif in some twisted Wagnerian opera, and the shutting-down of my PC is now a five-minute ritual involving an infinitely heart-breaking rendition of Smile. I imagine that almost everyone has, by the time they reach their mid-twenties, been monumentally gypped in some way or another by the vagaries of Existence; Fortune’s footpads have felt all our collars by then, we have all been desperately disappointed and betrayed by the world or, worse, one person in it. Songs like Smile would not work otherwise, because they are dependent on the fact that our worst miseries are always memories. Present pain is too great a burden to bear, no-one can make us smile in the face of that, not even Chaplin. But pride in pains past, displaying scars, wowing over wounds that ought to have killed an elephant, that is the business of Life, that is as much commerce as we should with woe engage.