I am just underway with editing and co-authoring a book designed for general readers as well as specialists in philosophy, psychiatry, and clinical psychology. Yes, it’s ambitious. My colleagues in the project are: Tom Davis, associate professor of Philosophy at Whitman College; Susan Pickett (my wife), recently retired professor of Music at Whitman College; Mark Brown, a psychotherapist and jazz-folk musician, and Lara Riley, a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapist. Here’s the beginning of the Prologue, in the hope that it tempts your curiosity.

“Our theme is this: grief is a dimension of the sublime and vice-versa. It’s one that for us first arose in the context of giving psychotherapy.[1] I found myself, a psychiatrist providing therapy for persons sometimes having suffered recent, grievous loss, thinking that the distress so often I was witness to in the therapy session was not about, directly at least, the loss itself but about the suffering of it, not the primary feeling of loss, but a secondary one about having to feel such a thing. More and more often I’d recall a video I’d seen once during residency training, one in which the psychologist Leigh McCullough is prompting a patient to tell her more about a mournful feeling he’s bearing but having difficulty expressing. In the course of her encouragement, she mentions that there is something “right” about the primary feeling of grief, a feeling instantly discernable if one is paying close attention and is willing and able to hold onto it.”

[1] Arose for us, authors of this book, though the theme is ancient. Consider the legend of Venus and Adonis. The grief borne by the former over the death of the latter, her mortal swain (on the tusk of a wild boar), prompts her to create the anemone, accomplished by mixing her nectar with his blood, pooled there on the earth. The anemone is a red beauty; it blossoms annually but is of short life—petals blowing away (the Windflower) (Bullfinch, p.54.) This theme, the union of grief & beauty, becomes “codified” through an annual Athenian midsummer festival for women, one in which there’s ritualized ceremony (“… that alternated between joy and grief”) for the death of young plants that have been deliberately planted in overly hot weather (Freeman, p.146).