Perpetual Mourning

Make the most of your regrets—never smother your sorrow but tend and cherish it till it come to have a separate and integral interest. To regret deeply is to live afresh. By so doing you will be astonished to find yourself restored once more to all your emoluments.

Thoreau, Journal, November 13th, 1839

A difficult but useful exercise I was required to do in grad school was, after reading a long and dense philosophical or theological text, summarize the argument and important points in one page. I still have a few of these summaries and they have proven useful when I need to refer back to them.

With that in mind I decided the other day I wanted to try something similar, not with an entire book but just a particular idea. After starting I realized I wanted to change course slightly and instead try to summarize the way I remembered the idea, without referring to the source text at all. Put differently, I wanted to type out from memory the outline and shape of the idea as it has imprinted itself in my mind.

The particular idea I wanted to try and summarize comes from Branka Arsić’s book Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau. She covers a lot of ground in the book but begins with an account of Thoreau’s profound grief over the death of his brother and how the Greek literature Thoreau read before and during that time influenced his own highly unique theory of grief.

Integral to Thoreau’s theory of grief is the Greek phrase penthos alaston, which can be translated as unforgettable sorrow, or unforgetting mourning. The phrase occurs throughout the works Thoreau was reading and translating during that time. For example, in the Odyssey:

But you stop this sad song, this disastrous song, which again and again affects my very own heart in my breast, wearing it down, since an unforgettable grief [penthos alaston] comes over me, more than ever. I feel this way because that is the kind of person I long for, recalling his memory again and again, the memory of a man whose glory extends far and wide throughout Hellas and midmost Argos.

Odyssey, part 1, Gregory Nagy trans.

What follows is my attempt to summarize the concept of perpetual mourning that Arsić argues (persuasively) Thoreau formed after the death of his brother. I use grief and mourning interchangeably but in all cases I am referring to penthos alaston:

Mourning is not only something humans experience; grief is not just an emotional phenomenon and it isn’t even primarily psychological. Mourning is ontological and is constitutive of life itself.

When humans interpret their grief as primarily psychological or emotional they misunderstand its primary function and underestimate its potency. Human mourning is an imperfect imitation of the mourning of nature. While nature’s grief is perpetual, humanity’s grief is temporary and limited.

Nature grieves perpetually and, therefore, perfectly: her grief is never-ending and unceasing. This perpetual mourning is the mechanism by which the processes of nature continually recover what is lost to oblivion: nothing is ever lost in nature; nothing is ever destroyed. Life and death become unintelligible in this process. The boundary between the two is so porous that it is meaningless to make a distinction. If nature recovers everything then what does it really mean to die? What can escape her? There is only life, that is, only the transformation of all things into all other things, endlessly, and without loss.

Through nature’s perpetual mourning of what is lost all is recovered.

Thoreau’s correspondence can be just as illuminating as his journal entries, written essays, or books. Below are some passages from letters he wrote shortly after the death of his brother, John Thoreau. These are among the first words he wrote after that event and so offer rare insight into how his theories of grief and perpetual mourning were beginning to take shape.

We feel at first as if some opportunities of kindness and sympathy were lost, but learn afterward that any pure grief is ample recompense for all. That is, if we are faithful;—for a spent grief is but sympathy with the soul that disposes events, and is as natural as the resin of Arabian trees.—Only nature has a right to grieve perpetually, for she only is innocent. Soon the ice will melt, and the blackbirds sing along the river which he frequented, as pleasantly as ever. The same everlasting serenity will appear in this face of God, and we will not be sorrowful, if he is not.

letter to Lucy Brown, March 2nd, 1842

This is from a letter Thoreau wrote to Emerson about two months after the death of Emerson’s son Waldo. Thoreau was especially fond of Waldo, who died two weeks after Thoreau’s brother.

How plain that death is only the phenomenon of the individual or class. Nature does not recognize it, she finds her own again under new forms without loss. Yet death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident—It is as common as life. Men die in Tartary, in Ethiopia—in England—in Wisconsin. And after all what portion of this so serene and living nature can be said to be alive? Do this year’s grasses and foliage outnumber all the past.

Every blade in the field—every leaf in the forest—lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up. It is the pastime of a full quarter of the year. Dead trees—sere leaves—dried grass and herbs—are not these a good part of our life? And what is that pride of our autumnal scenery but the hectic flash—the sallow and cadaverous countenance of vegetation—its painted throes—with the November air for canvas—

When we look over the fields are we not saddened because the particular flowers or grasses will wither—for the law of their death is the law of new life. Will not the land be in good heart because the crops die down from year to year? The herbage cheerfully consents to bloom, and wither, and give place to a new.

So it is with the human plant. We are partial and selfish when we lament the death of the individual, unless our plaint be a paean to the departed soul, and a sigh as the wind sighs over the fields, which no shrub interprets into its private grief.

One might as well go into mourning for every sere leaf—but the more innocent and wiser soul will snuff a fragrance in the gales of autumn, and congratulate Nature upon her health.

letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, March 11th, 1842