Unseverable

Juliana Schiesari put me onto Kathleen Woodward and her insights as to how the mourning process may vary with age.

The notion of attachment to life is commonly cast metaphorically in terms of bonds, ties, and threads. When we speak of detachment in old age, of loosening of bonds to life, I think we may mistake the process at work. It may be not that we are detaching ourselves from others but that we have refused to untie the bonds which have attached us to those we have lost. We may begin to live with the dead.

"Between Mourning and Melancholia: Roland Barthes's Camera Lucinda" in Aging and Its Discontents. Note how this passage is cast in the idiom of a "we" that invites identification and acceptance that this the way things are for "us". We become tied to the point of view.

And so for day 328
07.11.2007