There is no denying the Barack Obama has a rare gift of oratory. He has Clinton's lawyerly grasp of semantic nuance, Kennedy's gift for figurative language, lacking only, perhaps, Reagan's common touch. He possesses a voice of uncommon beauty, like the Abraham Lincoln of our imagination. According to contemporary accounts, Lincoln had a grating, unpleasant voice, but our imagination gives Lincoln a voice with majesty to match the nobility of his words, as melodious and resonant as a distant echo of the Voice of God.
So expectations for Obama's inaugural speech were high, to put it mildly. The Daily Show's Asif Mandvi remarked:
Tommorow's speech, with its sweeping themes and majestic rhetoric, will make sweet, sweet love to the English language.
But Obama chose to defy expectations, delivering a speech that was sober, even a bit of a rebuke to the American people. Yet somehow this somber oratory didn't seem to reduce the crowd's fever of ecstasy. Were the millions of jubilant Americans, as some commentators suggest, out of touch with reality? Which brings us to this week's word: euphoria.
The term "euphoria", as we use it today, has something of a connotation of mental illness, of an affective state inappropriate to objective reality. In fact the dictionary defines it this way: "a feeling of happiness, confidence, or well-being sometimes exaggerated in pathological states as mania." However this negative sense of the word "euphoria" is relatively recent. It did not always connote mania.
The word "euphoria", and the rarer by very similar word "euphory", are etymologically related to the words "metaphor" and "infer". They all derive, ultimately, from the Greek pherein, which means "to bear" in the sense of carrying something. A metaphor is a figure of speech that carries meaning from one situation over to another (meta - "over","across", or in some cases like metaphysics "after" or "beyond"). To "infer" something is to add to one's body of facts by "carrying in" new conclusions derived from those facts.
The roots of the word "euphoria" suggest not insanity, but carrying something well (eu- "well" + pherein "to carry"). As in many Greek contributions to English, it entered the language several hundred years ago a medical term; however it did not, in itself, represent a morbid phenomenon. To the physician of the 1700s, a "euphoric" patient was one who bore the burden of illness well, who was able to feel comfortable and maintain a sense of well being even though sick. What the physician calls euphoria, a theologian might call by a term familiar to us in the last election: hope.
In language, words are often unreasonably tarred by association, so it would be wise not to mistake bearing the travail of sickness for sickness itself. Emotions are so often governed not so much by our current state of well-being, but our expectations. More than anything else, happiness consists of truly being what we imagine ourselves to be. When we fall short of our self-image, and anticipate that shortfall to continue indefinitely, the prospect of years of keeping up appearances is an odious and unbearable burden. Sometimes in the face of that a rebuke feels like a breath of fresh air. The work we are called to may be grim, but it is real and therefore meaningful.
Like many Americans, my wife and I queued up to donate blood on 9/11. Then we waited for the President to tell us what else we could do. And waited. We were ready to do great things, but what we got was the instruction to go about our business as if nothing extraordinary had happened, except maybe to do it with a bit more fear. Americans have waited over seven long years for the call, seven years in which a few gave much, but the many did little other than to allow our unthinking, obedient fear to become a spreading ulceration on the national spirit.
Our country is sick - more than that, it has made itself sick -- through a failure of purpose. A cure starts with confronting that fact with the firm resolution to bear the burdens of recovery well.