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A Box Full of Darkness
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Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
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— Mary Oliver, “The Uses of Sorrow”
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Yes, we’ve all experienced apparent setbacks in life that eventually prove to be our way forward. But when I saw Mary Oliver’s phrase, “a box full of darkness,” I thought immediately of Pandora’s box. The box in question was actually an earthen jar that the gods had stuffed full of nasty surprises for humanity in retaliation for Prometheus’ theft of fire from Zeus. The bearer of these gifts was the world’s first woman, Pandora, whose name in Greek means “all gifted.” She was a nasty piece of work in her own right. Not to put too fine a point on it, she was a honey trap, deliberately fashioned to be both beautiful and treacherous. Prometheus had warned his brother Epimetheus not to accept any gifts from the gods. Nevertheless, the hapless Epimetheus had taken Pandora as his bride. Her dowry, in a manner of speaking, was the jar. The gods, it should be added, had warned her not to open it, knowing full well she would be unable to resist.
The similarities between Pandora’s story and the biblical account of Eve in the Garden of Eden are hard to miss. Both were the instruments by which evil and death came into the world. Both were made by gods — Pandora was molded from earth and Eve from Adam’s rib, although Adam himself was also made of earth. Both disobeyed gods in doing what they did. Thereafter, the stories diverge — or so it would seem. Eve was ostensibly created because Adam needed a companion, whereas Pandora’s purpose was explicitly to wreak havoc upon the world. Accordingly, Eve — and to a lesser extent, Adam — took the blame for having eaten the forbidden fruit, whereas there is little doubt Zeus was behind Pandora’s transgression. However, the guileless Eve was egged on by a serpent described as “the subtlest of all God’s creatures,” leading one to suspect humanity’s downfall was also a setup.
Hesiod’s version of the Pandora story, Works and Day, written in the eighth century BCE, did not elaborate on the “sorrow and mischief” contained in the jar, beyond saying that “all they who dwelt on Olympus gave each a gift, a plague to men who eat bread.” Those gifts included the bearer of all the other gifts, the prototype of womankind, Pandora herself, whom Hesiod writes was explicitly created with “a shameless mind and a deceitful nature.” Lest there be any doubt about his unbridled misogyny, he goes on to say, “For from her is the race of women and female kind: of her is the deadly race and tribe of women who live amongst mortal men to their great trouble.”
One is left to speculate on why the nasty things that flew out of Pandora’s jar were characterized as gifts from the gods, much less why Pandora herself was regarded as a gift. The exact contents of the jar remained unspecified. We know only that before Prometheus — one of the old gods — stole fire from Zeus “the tribes of men lived on earth remote and free from ills and hard toil and heavy sickness which bring the Fates upon men.” Like the biblical Eden, in other words, earth was a paradise before women showed up to spoil everything. But why gifts? If for no other reason than the gods gave them to mortals, and they came in a box, or jar. Pandora herself came gift-wrapped, decked out by various goddesses with flowers and finery and fine jewelry to make her more enticing.
There is no suggestion in Hesiod’s brief account of Pandora’s misadventures that he intended the word “gifts” to be understood ironically. There is no doubt, based on Zeus’ threat to Prometheus, that the gods intended to bring “a great plague to you yourself and to men that shall be.” The subsequent warning to Pandora not to open the jar should have been the tipoff, even if the immortals fully expected that she couldn’t resist removing the lid.
Hope is the wild card in the Pandora story. As soon as Pandora realized what she had loosed on the world, she tried to close the lid. Hope was the one gift of the gods that remained trapped within. At first glance, this final gift would appear to be at odds with all the others. It helps perhaps to understand that Greeks did not necessarily regard hope as a good thing. “Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him,” the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche commented, “but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man’s torment.”
To fully understand the nature of the gifts in Pandora’s box full of darkness, we should realize the story doesn’t begin with her removing the lid but with Prometheus’ theft of fire. Fire may be understood as symbolic of consciousness or self-awareness, and it belonged exclusively to the gods until Prometheus stole it and gave it to humans. In much the same way, eating the forbidden fruit in the Genesis story gave humans knowledge of good and evil, making them like God. The price paid by the humans in each case was awareness of their own mortality and all the ills that came with it, as the darkness within themselves was illuminated by their newly acquired understanding.
It takes true depth of understanding to appreciate the gifts found in a box full of darkness in the sense that Mary Oliver is getting at in her poem above. Only a masochist would welcome death and suffering. And yet we may eventually discover that suffering teaches compassion, which makes us fully human. And death, as Kafka once observed, gives meaning to life because we know it stops. If we can just hold on despite all that afflicts us, we may discover that the light shines brightest in the deepest darkness.
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