On Loss

Three meditations on loss.


One 
At the start of this month, I watched Isabel Allende talking to Andrew Denton on Elders. Her words stayed in my head for days afterwards – she was like a mystical sage. Viz:

Denton: You left Chile and you went into exile because your life was in danger. What is it like not to have a place to belong? 

Allende: At the beginning I was totally paralysed by nostalgia, the feeling that everything had been taken away from me. I had lost my family, my house, my in-laws that I adored, even my dog, my job, of course, everything that was dear to me. And my country. Your country is the place where you don’t have to ask – you know the code, you know the clues, you know the jokes, you have the references, you get the accent. You look at a person and you know exactly where that person stands in the society. You only have that in your own country and, of course, I lost it when I left Chile. I became a writer because I was living in exile and my first book was an attempt to recover what I had lost. So in a way now I have my country in my books.

Two 
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From ‘One Art’, by Elizabeth Bishop

Three
He suddenly recalled the famous myth from Plato’s Symposium: People were hermaphrodites until God split them in two, and now all the halves wander the world over seeking one another. Love is the longing for the half of ourselves we have lost.

Let us suppose that such is the case, that somewhere in the world each of us has a partner who once formed part of our body. Tomas’s other part is the young woman he dreamed about. The trouble is, man does not find the other part of himself. Instead, he is sent Tereza in a bulrush basket. But what happens if he nevertheless later meets the one who was meant for him, the other part of himself? Whom is he to prefer? The woman from the bulrush basket or the woman from Plato’s myth?

He tried to picture himself living in an ideal world with the young woman from the dream. He sees Tereza walking past the open windows of their ideal house. She is alone and stops to look in at him with an infinitely sad expression in her eyes. He cannot withstand her glance. Again, he feels her pain in his own heart. Again, he falls prey to compassion and sinks deep into her soul. He leaps out of the window, but she tells him bitterly to stay where he feels happy, making those abrupt, angular movements that so annoyed and displeased him. He grabs her nervous hands and presses them between his own to calm them. And he knows that time and again he will abandon the house of his happiness, time and again abandon his paradise and the woman from his dream and betray the ‘Es muss sein!’ of his love to go off with Tereza, the woman born of six laughable fortuities.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being