Sunt lacrimae rerum

“Sunt lacrimae rerum” is a Latin expression invoked as Saladin Chamcha withdraws into his den after the world around him has been altered. Attributed to what the former teacher Haji Sufyan would have said, it gives a name to Saladin’s attention to “the tears in things”: grief appears not only as a private feeling but as something he encounters in objects, images, and the unstable boundary between the real and the imagined.

The Phrase in Saladin’s Retreat

After the rupture, Saladin remains almost motionless in his den for many days. He lets the room grow back around him at its own pace, waiting for it to recover the solid, comforting quality it had possessed before the universe seemed to change. The phrase introduces this suspension as an effort to perceive what has been damaged, rather than as a simple return to ordinary life.

Television and the Altered Body

Saladin watches television with half an eye and compulsively changes channels. The remote control levels the programmes’ varied contents: commercials, murders, game shows, and other images of real and imagined life acquire an equal weight. The set becomes a parade of bodily difference and transformation, from industrially crossbred creatures on Dr. Who to reports of a preserved merman, lycanthropy, possible centaurs, and sex-change surgery. These images make bodily alteration seem pervasive, while also intensifying Saladin’s sense of his own condition.

Private Injury and Public Images

The passage connects that inward hurt to an earlier story about a broken vase. Saladin had understood the unforgiving man’s insistence that the injury could not be measured by the apparent triviality of what was broken. The allusion sharpens the expression’s attention to sorrow that remains invisible to outsiders: an injury’s depth cannot be read from its surface.

That distinction returns in Saladin’s bitter response to Jumpy Joshi’s poem, “I Sing the Body Eclectic.” Pamela Chamcha’s baby has been conceived without the chromosomal damage that Saladin associates with his own broken body. When he catches sight of himself in a rerun of an old Aliens Show classic, the television screen brings the public spectacle of freakish bodies back to his private self-image. “Sunt lacrimae rerum” thus gathers the passage’s damaged objects, mediated images, and bodily difference into a single mood of sorrow lodged in the world he is trying to inhabit.