different place/grief

When I was living near the biggest op-shop in the Southern Hemisphere, give or take a room, I would acquire books rather randomly, daily for a dollar, or sometimes getting lucky, in handfuls of ex-Library lots. Reading itself became random. One of the books I picked up in those days was A Grief Observed which I quickly put away.
Sorting through the chaos recently, I found it again, but this time it has found me.

... But there are other difficulties. 'Where is she now?' That is, in what place is she at the present time? But if H. is not a body — and the body I loved is certainly no longer she — she is in no place at all. And 'the present time' is a data point in our time series. It is as if she were on a journey without me and I said, looking at my watch, 'I wonder is she at Euston now.' But unless she is proceeding at sixty seconds a minute along this same timeline that all we living people travel by, what does now mean? If the dead are not in time, or not in our sort of time, is there any clear difference, when we speak of them, between was and is and will be?... From A Grief Observed (1961)

I drafted this a month ago. Thought of it when I read about an online chronicle of grief
(via Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

---

Comments: different place/grief

'A Grief Observed' is an extraordinary book, entirely accessible to the non-believer, although Lewis was, of course, a devout if unorthodox Christian.

And that's a hell of a link too. Thanks for it.
Posted by Dick at February 14, 2005 10:01 AM

The book is so honest - even down to its form. A parameter of a notebook, one notebook's worth because resolution is not easy.
Posted by boynton at February 14, 2005 01:23 PM