The actor:	Heath Ledger
The character:	Ennis Del Mar
The film:	Brokeback Mountain
The line:	“If you can’t fix it, Jack, you gotta stand it.”

“Who knows if we shall ever see them again?” Morrel said, wiping away a tear.

“My dearest,” said Valentine, “has the count not just told us that all human wisdom was contained in these two words—’wait’ and ‘hope’?”

Alexandre Dumas, trans. Robin Buss

Maximilien Morrel comes from a comfortable background and Valentine de Villefort a wealthy one. Valentine in particular has suffered much by the end of The Count of Monte Cristo, but the two of them are equipped to persevere. They have the background and temperament to do so. Now that the mysterious Count of Monte Cristo has exposed a number of wicked deeds, committed a few himself, and generally wreaked havoc on an especially guilty subset of fancy people, the world has been adequately set right for people like Maximilien and Valentine to live rightly. They can afford to wait and to hope, or to put it more grammatically, each one can say, “I wait, and I hope.”

On some basic level, this is what Ennis and Jack are trying to do as well, although the work is split up between them. Ennis is waiting. Jack is hoping. But these two men, a couple of ne’er-do-wells who wind up continuing to do little and to marry well, respectively, have a perseverance that’s more like stubbornness than anything else. It is a metal in raw form; it can be broken. Ennis complains at one point during the summer he and Jack are on Brokeback Mountain that he’s tired of eating canned beans. “Too early in summer to be sick of beans,” the supplier says. Jack is even more impatient, much more impulsive, although in the long run neither Ennis nor Jack is really better at the hanging in there thing. They just suffer in different ways. Jack suffers in hissy fits and shouts. When he’s upset, the world has to know how mad he is. Ennis gets upset too, but his frustration is like an abscess right above his lip. Drain it and it’ll just leak into his mouth, between his teeth, deeper inside him. All of us are more like Ennis and Jack than Maximilien and Valentine. Our waiting and hoping have expiration dates. Wait and hope too long and the feelings curdle.

Most human wisdom is contained in this line, spoken by Heath Ledger with the light of a small flame against his face. It’s very, very close to being the gist Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer, but said more simply. There’s a savage brevity in Ennis’s words, savage not because he says them that way (his voice is even leaning towards matter-of-fact) but because the feeling behind that sentence is so ferocious. If you believe “accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can,” then you believe in “If you can’t fix it, [loved one], you gotta stand it.” Where Ennis differs from Reinhold is in that third piece which is pointedly left out here. “The wisdom to know the difference” doesn’t figure into Ennis’s mantra, because in this particular case he feels quite sure of the result. Leave aside Dumas and Niebuhr for a moment. If Jack were Marlowe’s passionate shepherd, he’d never get to the second stanza. His beloved will not live with him nor be his love.

We live in a world where hope is difficult to come by. The consequences for our earth and everything else downstream from that starting point are being measured not in “how can we solve it?” but “how can we mitigate it?” There is an autocratic, sometimes fascist impulse in world governments which we haven’t seen in living memory. The things we love are stripped for their parts and sold by the rich to other rich people, who must hate us and those adored things in equal measure. There are things that can be fixed, things that can be solved with organization and true force of will. But there are other things that we will have to stand, things which we are already being forced to weather. “If you can’t fix it, you’ve got to stand it” is about being realistic. Most of all, it is about one of the great unspoken virtues in forbearance, which is the seed of change.

In all likelihood, Jack’s plan for the two of them to take his divorce settlement and start a ranch would end in tears. Two unmarried men living together in the mid-late 20th Century would spark questions, and more pertinently, there really wouldn’t be any way for the two of them to hide. Even when they thought they were completely alone that first summer on Brokeback Mountain, they were still discovered. Yet when Ennis considers what it means to “stand it,” perhaps he doesn’t imagine it will mean opening Jack’s closet after his death and breathing deeply from one of his shirts, grieving the only way that he’s allowed to.