'danced fatalistically with nature'

She had tea waiting when Ethan came back. They sat outside. He wore nothing over his short-sleeved shirt despite the chill. Pammy wondered whether it would be all right to get him a sweater. She decided finally it might be taken as an imposition of sorts, a subtle belittling of his distress. What comfort, really, would warm clothing give him now? It occurred to her that people unconsciously honored the processes of the physical world, danced fatalistically with nature whenever death took someone close to them. She believed Ethan wanted to feel what was here. If it rained, he wouldn't move. If she draped a sweater over his shoulders, he might well shrug it off. We are down to eating and sleeping, if that. Rudiments, she thought. Whatever the minimum. That's what we're down to. She watched color spread across the sky beyond the Camden Hills. A sunset is the story of the world's day. They spun back away from it, upended like astronauts, but snug in their seats, night-riding, as the first stars pinched into view.

—Don DeLillo, Players (1977)

I Shall Look at the World Through Tears

On the way back I thought about tears.  Our culture says that men must be strong and that the strength of a man in sorrow is to be seen in his tearless face.  Tears are for women.  Tears are signs of weakness and women are permitted to be weak.  Of course it's better if they too are strong.

But why celebrate stoic tearlessness?  Why insist on never outwarding the inward when that inward is bleeding?  Does enduring while crying not require as much strength as never crying?  Must we always mask our suffering?  May we not sometimes allow people to see and enter it?  I mean, may men not do this?

And why is it so important to act strong?  I have been graced with the strength to endure.  But I have been assaulted, and in the assault wounded, grievously wounded.  Am I to pretend otherwise?  Wounds are ugly, I know.  They repel.  But must they always be swathed?

I shall look at the world through tears.  Perhaps I shall see things that dry-eyed I could not see.

--Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff (1987)

'growing in the direction of your own nature'

Grainier felt sure this dog was got of a wolf, but it never even whimpered in reply when the packs in the distance, some as far away as the Selkirks on the British Columbia side, sang at dusk. The creature needed to be taught its nature, Grainier felt. One evening he got down beside it and howled. The little pup only sat on its rump with an inch of pink tongue jutting stupidly from its closed mouth. “You’re not growing in the direction of your own nature, which is to howl when the others do,” he told the mongrel. He stood up straight himself and howled long and sorrowfully over the gorge, and over the low quiet river he could hardly see across this close to nightfall … Nothing from the pup. But often, thereafter, when Grainier heard the wolves at dusk, he laid his head back and howled for all he was worth, because it did him good. It flushed out something heavy that tended to collect in his heart, and after an evening’s program with his choir of British Columbian wolves he felt warm and buoyant.

He tried telling Kootenai Bob about this development. “Howling, are you?” the Indian said. “There it is for you, then. That’s what happens, that’s what they say: There’s not a wolf alive that can’t tame a man.”

—Denis Johnson, Train Dreams (2011) (originally published in The Paris Review, 2002)

Now my years are spent in lamentation...

Now my years are spent in lamentation, and you, Lord, my eternal Father, are my only solace. I have broken up into times, whose order I know not, and in tumultuous changes my recollections, the innermost sinews of my soul, are being torn apart, until I should flow together again in you, purified and melted in the fire of your love.

—St. Augustine, Confessions (398)

Animated Expressions of Divine Wisdom

In Augustine’s Platonic theism, beings made in God’s image have the capacity to see themselves as God sees them — not as insignificant assemblages of particulars in space and time, whose value must be arbitrarily assigned, but as animated expressions of divine wisdom…[Augustine] sees himself disfigured over time because he lacks the unified view God has of him in eternity. When God sees Augustine, God represents him as perfected, and if Augustine could see himself through God’s eyes, he would have no difficulty making his life out to be significant and intelligible.

—James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (1992)

the heart adjusts / to its new weight

The heart stops briefly when someone dies,
a quick pain as you hear the news, & someone passes
from your outside life to inside. Slowly the heart adjusts
to its new weight, & slowly everything continues, sanely.

—Ted Berrigan, "Things to Do in Providence" (1970) (Selected Poems)