In the Midst of Winter

Fülszöveg

This book is a gathering from world literature of the words of those who have survived the death of someone they love. Across the centuries, from the raw emotions of private journals to the distillations of poetry, the writers speak of the pain of grief and describe their process through the spiral of mourning. I hope what they have written will help break through the frozen sea in readers who find themselves in sorrow, and will enable those who would help the bereaved to understand some of grief's contradictions. I also hope their words will prepare readers who have I not yet suffered such a loss for the nature of the journey to a new self that mourning calls forth.
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This sensitive selection of writings about the process of mourning—chosen from poems, diaries, letters, journals, autobiographies,... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This book is a gathering from world literature of the words of those who have survived the death of someone they love. Across the centuries, from the raw emotions of private journals to the distillations of poetry, the writers speak of the pain of grief and describe their process through the spiral of mourning. I hope what they have written will help break through the frozen sea in readers who find themselves in sorrow, and will enable those who would help the bereaved to understand some of grief's contradictions. I also hope their words will prepare readers who have I not yet suffered such a loss for the nature of the journey to a new self that mourning calls forth.
eMary']cme<2Mqffit
fmkrJ r'
m 'i'"'
/ i' '' 'I
Wmi'-n
I'll 'M-i; i vr I, V'/, '''I IM
ii' -'1 ¦ 'fv
iMfii ^'Hli
r'M i ,
ril'lil 'r''
If.I
r;,
.1 (
! I

/ h'l ; i i
This sensitive selection of writings about the process of mourning—chosen from poems, diaries, letters, journals, autobiographies, fiction—grew out of the editor's own need. Some months after the death of her husband of many years, when she was still shaken by the intensity of her grief and what seemed to her the irrationality of many of her feelings, Mary Jane Moffat discovered that family and friends did not seem to be able to offer all the reassurance and comfort that she needed, and she turned to reading. She has brought together the writings that she has found the most consoling and that reveal best the nature and the progress of grief.
The selections run over the centuries and are from almost ail regions of the world. Some are familiar but gain new resonance from being read in this context; some are virtually unknown. Among the authors are Catullus, Shakespeare, Proust, Chekhov, Mark Twain, Maimonides, Rilke, Camus, Frost, Agee, C. S. Lewis, Virginia Woolf and Colette. Together the passages follow the course of the bereaved's emotions over the first days, months, years, demonstrating at last the truth of Camus' statement, "In the midst of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."
Here is a book not only for the bereaved, who should find it of enormous solace, but for all of us who must someday face the emotions expressed here and who want to see how the great minds of the world have coped with it. Vissza