![]() She has plenty of examples of people who suffer a variety of ailments as they physically adjust to being deprived of a profound attachment. Forster (as quoted by Julian Barnes), that “one death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another.” Holinger respects the stinging particularity of the grieving process, but she also wants people to know they are not alone in their sadness.Īfter describing different forms of grief, Holinger spends a few brief chapters on how the processes of digesting loss are manifested in the body. At the same time, she cites the saying of E. The clinician hopes that readers who are stuck in grief without respite might find these accounts, from Charles Darwin on the loss of his daughter to Helen MacDonald on the loss of her father, helpful in understanding their own painful experiences. This Anatomy, like Burton’s, is full of quotations, and Holinger’s orchestration of different voices describing the vicissitudes of their anguish is often moving. Holinger is a clinical psychologist who wants to “help readers find the information they need most.” An essential part of that information is learning how others manage grief - or, rather, how some extraordinarily gifted writers worked their way through bereavement. This is a very sad book.īut perhaps sadness is appropriate for a book offering sympathy to the bereaved. There is no humor in The Anatomy of Grief. This is a “book for the bereaved,” she writes, and she offers explanations of the scientific sort of what they might be going through (e.g., what is happening to their brains), together with stories of those who find a way to live with their grief until they can get to the other side of the suffering. Holinger begins her new book, The Anatomy of Grief, with earnest empathy. While Burton can be satirical - in the preface he refers to himself as “Democritus Junior” - Dorothy P. Melancholy in this sense is the character of mortality. ![]() Burton understood thatįrom these melancholy dispositions, no man living is free, no stoic, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself so well composed, but more or less, some time or other he feels the smart of it. ![]() Yet Burton knew well the enormity of the challenge, the power of melancholy, admitting in his preface that he himself was writing about the condition as a means of temporarily avoiding it. Burton wanted to analyze the causes of this sadness, while also offering ways to relieve it - “prognotisckes, and several cures,” as his subtitle has it. IN 1621, ROBERT BURTON PUBLISHED The Anatomy of Melancholy, a compendium of medical, astrological, and literary perspectives on a deep sadness that the author saw afflicting a great many of the men and women of his day. ![]()
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