Sondheim's Muscular Gratitude in Context
Plus, a Thanksgiving crossword! | Sondheim Supplement #42
Thank you… Next?
In our most recent essay, we traced the muscular gratitude that we find in Sondheim’s works: a thanksgiving that counts cost, admits paradox, and refuses to airbrush the mess. We watched Robert demand to be hurt, Fay and Hapgood bless a moment already passing, and Marie catalog what endures. Today, let’s locate that practice within a broader intellectual tradition. The “sorry-grateful” ethic sits at a remarkable crossroads: existentialist thought, Stoic discipline, and the poetic tradition of radical attention.
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I. The Existentialist Inheritance
When Robert in Company finally demands connection—“Somebody hold me too close, / Somebody hurt me too deep”—he’s practicing what Jean-Paul Sartre called authentic choice. Sartre argued that we live in mauvaise foi (bad faith) when we pretend our circumstances determine our lives, when we hide behind roles and expectations rather than choosing. Robert has spent the entire show doing exactly this: observing other people’s marriages, cataloging their compromises, using their complexity as an excuse for his own paralysis. “Being Alive” is his refusal of bad faith. He stops spectating and steps into the frame.
But, as we know, Robert does not choose transcendence, nor escape, nor even happiness. He chooses engagement with difficulty. This aligns with Albert Camus’s concept of “lucid indifference”—not pessimism, but clear-eyed acceptance of life’s absurdity coupled with the decision to live fully anyway. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus asks us to imagine Sisyphus happy, to see the man pushing the boulder uphill not as tragic but as engaged in meaningful rebellion against meaninglessness. Robert’s prayer is similarly paradoxical: he blesses the disturbances that will keep him awake to his life. He’s grateful in advance for the very difficulties he’s been avoiding.
✍️ Below, we’ll continue to trace these lineages—existentialism, Stoicism, and the poets who treat attention as an ethic—and see how they illuminate Sondheim’s muscular form of gratitude. If you’re a free subscriber, support our work for a few dollars per month to enjoy full access to our Supplements. ✍️