Perspectives | On Grief (Part Two)
By Didion, Butler, Hafez and Others
The greatest gift of literature is the way it can connect our private pain to the shared human story. As James Baldwin is often quoted as saying, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”
This week, then, we return to one of the most profound and universal human experiences—grief. We encounter writers disoriented by loss, whose sense of time is altered, whose worlds have been hollowed out, and whose love endures beyond absence.
Part one of this collection can be found here.
Louis-Jean-François Lagrenée, La Mélancolie, c. 1785
“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.”
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, 2005
“Time does not bring relief; you all have lied / Who told me time would ease me of my pain! / I miss him in the weeping of the rain; / I want him at the shrinking of the tide; / The old snows melt from every mountain-side, / And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; / But last year’s bitter loving must remain / Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide. / There are a hundred places where I fear / To go,—so with his memory they brim. / And entering with relief some quiet place / Where never fell his foot or shone his face / I say, “There is no memory of him here!” / And so stand stricken, so remembering him.”
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Time does not bring relief
“The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; / Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; / Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. / For nothing now can ever come to any good.”
W.H. Auden (1907-1973), Extract from Stop the Clocks
“Grief is an obsessive state, and I could not begin to suggest the obsessiveness of this mental condition; there is no way to write about it accurately, since the very writing would be repetitive. So, in writing of extreme mental states, it is better to say too little than too much.”
Joyce Carol Oates, A Widow’s Story, 2011
“I know that our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part. Thirteen years ago I lost a brother & with his spirit I converse daily & hourly in the Spirit & see him in my remembrance in the regions of my Imagination. I hear his advice & even now write from his Dictate. Forgive me for Expressing to you my Enthusiasm which I wish all to partake of Since it is to me a Source of Immortal Joy: even in this world by it I am the companion of Angels. May you continue to be so more & more & to be more and more persuaded, that every mortal loss is an Immortal Gain. The Ruins of Time builds Mansions in Eternity.”
William Blake, letter to William Hayley, 1800
George Clause, Youth Mourning, 1916
“Grief was grief, she thought. It was pain and loss and despair—an abrupt end where there should have been a continuing.”
Octavia E. Butler, Dawn, 1987
“Death, of thee do I make my moan, / Who hadst my lady away from me, / Nor wilt assuage thine enmity /Till with her life thou hast mine own: / For since that hour my strength has flown. / Lo! what wrong was her life to thee, / Death? / Two we were, and the heart was one; / Which now being dead, dead I must be, / Or seem alive as lifelessly / As in the choir the painted stone, / Death!”
François Villon (c.1451-1463), To Death Of His Lady
“A month ago my mother died and we were very close, my mother and I. I was there when she died and I've been trying to — as many people do when somebody dies — make sense of what happened. And the overwhelming sense that I've had, which I think is very common to a lot of people who are in grief, as we say, is that time grinds to a halt. Time just won't pass, it won't budge. It's as if time is kind of stuck.
Time, when someone dies, kind of stops.”
Simon Critchley for To The Best of Our Knowledge
“I spent a few hours sprawled on a sofa, while Maria was still seated by the bed. On that sofa I wept my most searing tears. Weeping obscures our guilt and allows us to accuse fate, without contradiction. I wept because I was losing the father for whom I always lived. No matter that I had given him scant company. Hadn't my efforts to become a better man been aimed at affording him some satisfaction? The success I yearned for was to be my boast to him, who had always doubted me, but primarily it would be his consolation. And now, on the contrary, he could no longer wait for me and was going off, convinced of my incurable weakness. My tears were very bitter.”
Italo Svevo, Zeno's Conscience, 1923
“Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly / let it cut more deep. / Let it ferment and season you / as few human or even divine ingredients can. / Something missing in my heart tonight / has made my eyes so soft / my voice so tender / my need of God / absolutely clear.”
Hafez (1325–1390)
“I'll go out one morning, / I won't have a house any more, I'll go out in the street; / the night's horror will have left me; / I'll be frightened of being alone. But I'll want to be alone. / I'll look at passers-by with the dead smile/ of someone who's beaten, but doesn't hate or cry out, / for I know that since ancient times fate - / all that you've been or will ever be - is in the blood, / in the murmur of the blood. I'll wrinkle my brows / alone, in the middle of the street, listening for an echo / in the blood. And there'll be no echo any more, / I'll look up and gaze at the street.”
Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), Deola's Return
Louisa Starr Canziani, War News, 1900
“I finally understand why people get tattoos of those they have lost. The need to proclaim not merely the loss but the love, the continuity. I am my father’s daughter. It is an act of resistance and refusal: grief telling you it is over and your heart saying it is not; grief trying to shrink your love to the past and your heart saying it is present.”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Notes on Grief, 2021
“What though the radiance which was once so bright / Be now forever taken from my sight, / Though nothing can bring back the hour / Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower? / I We will grieve not, rather find / Strength in what remains behind”
William Wordsworth, Extract from Splendour in the Grass (1770-1850)
“Why did you give no hint that night / That quickly after the morrow's dawn, / And calmly, as if indifferent quite, / You would close your term here, up and be gone / Where I could not follow / With wing of swallow / To gain one glimpse of you ever anon!
Never to bid good-bye Or lip me the softest call, / Or utter a wish for a word, while I Saw morning / harden upon the wall, Unmoved, unknowing That your great going / Had place that moment, and altered all.
Why do you make me leave the house / And think for a breath it is you I see / At the end of the alley of bending boughs / Where so often at dusk you used to be; / Till in darkening dankness / The yawning blankness / Of the perspective sickens me!
You were she who abode / By those red-veined rocks far West, / You were the swan-necked one who rode / Along the beetling Beeny Crest, / And, reining nigh me, / Would muse and eye me, / While Life unrolled us its very best.
Why, then, latterly did we not speak, / Did we not think of those days long dead, / And ere your vanishing strive to seek / That time's renewal? We might have said, / "In this bright spring weather / We'll visit together / Those places that once we visited."
Well, well! All's past amend, Unchangeable. It must go. / I seem but a dead man held on end / / To sink down soon. . . . O you could not know / That such swift fleeing / No soul foreseeing-- / Not even I--would undo me so!”
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), The Going
“Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.”
Rumi (1207-1273)
Romare Bearden, Detail from The Block, 1971
“Free of memory and of hope, / limitless, abstract, almost future, / the dead man is not a dead man: he is death. / Like the God of the mystics, / of Whom anything that could be said must be denied, / the dead one, alien everywhere, / is but the ruin and absence of the world. / We rob him of everything, / we leave him not so much as a color or syllable: / here, the courtyard which his eyes no longer see, / there, the sidewalk where his hope lay in wait. / Even what we are thinking, / he could be thinking;
we have divvied up like thieves / the booty of nights and days.”
Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), Remorse for any death
“If only I had the immortals' potion if only I had / A new soul to give you, if only you’d wake for a moment,
To see and to speak and delight in the whole of your dream / Standing right there by your side, next to you, bursting with life.
Roadways and public places, balconies, lanes in an uproar, / young maidens are picking flowers to sprinkle on your hair.
My fragrant forest full of tens of thousands of roots and leaves, / how can I the ill-fated believe I can ever lose you?
My son, all things have vanished and abandoned me back here / I have no eyes and cannot see, no mouth to let me speak.”
Yiannis Ritsos (1909-1990), If Only I Had The Immortal's Potion
“Each that we lose takes part of us; / A crescent still abides, / Which like the moon, some turbid night, / Is summoned by the tides.”
Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Louise and Frances Norcross, March 1884
Vincent Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate), 1890
Beautiful.