Sharif will see that his life has been a series of grief cycles, mourning some loss or another, most of them small. But near the end of this cycle, he will be transported by a heightened openness. It will bring him to the limits of himself, to a kind of disappearing point. From there, he'll feel how the walls of his isolation are pressed against

‘Attention is the beginning of devotion,’ writes the poet Mary Oliver, pointing to the fact that distraction and care are incompatible with each other: you can’t truly love a partner or a child, dedicate yourself to a career or to a cause – or just savour the pleasure of a stroll in the park – except to the extent that you can hold your attention

Norton spoke little of his wife, but her memory resided in him as the hidden treasure of his life; the emptiness he’d experienced in the wake of her death had been part of what propelled him toward art and aesthetics. He knew, as Belle was beginning to know, how beauty can meet loss, how aesthetic experience assuages.

I understood immediately that certain things—attention, great energy, total concentration, tenderness, risk, beauty—were elements of poetry. And I understood that these elements did not grow as grass grows from a seed, naturally and unstoppably, but rather were somehow gathered and discovered by the poet, and placed inside the poem. —Mary Oliver