Yet the fundamental loss remains—it doesn’t just dissipate—and, in a strange way, I think it can become a magnet for other losses. We come to see we are all simply creatures carrying around our ever-deepening loss. Small griefs seem to collect around the bigger primary grief. I think this realization allows us to become a true human being.

You’re right that profound grief quickly pushes you away from both certitude and indifference, which are unproductive feelings—

That’s right. Certitude and indifference. They’re the problems with this world.

We suffer as human beings, but out of that can come enormous joys, and genuine happiness, too. It can run in tandem with this ordinary sense of suffering. Otherwise, joy doesn’t resonate fully. Joy seems to leap forth out of suffering. Regardless of your loss, you see how beautiful, how meaningful, how joyful the world can suddenly be. Human beings... See more

And I don’t think this situation resolves itself as you grow older. In fact, more people just die. Loss becomes the primary condition of living. That doesn’t mean you’re in a hopeless, grief-stricken state all the time; it just means that you carry a deeper understanding of what it is to be human.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or... See more

FEH, my newest memoir (more details about that soon), began with my wanting to write about the rampant judgementalism and sneering contempt I was seeing all around me. It takes on God, Jesus, Paul Rudd, Nextdoor, social media, Schopenhauer, Wolf Blitzer and Yuval Noah Harari. And even with all those sacred cows, it felt bland... until I decided to ... See more

The most sacred cows are the ones that are sacred to ourselves.

That’s the catch.

As I got older, I realized that the books that stuck with me for decades where the ones in which the writer held a mirror up to himself - his shame, his self-loathing, his prejudice, his hatred, his fear, his anxiety - all that sacred stuff we don't want to admit we fee... See more

Much as working with a piano teacher is not, fundamentally, about learning songs, but about using songs to push yourself; I now think of our projects, not as ends in themselves, but as means to help us improve the underlying process and ourselves. This helps put me in the right frame of mind. I want this essay to turn out well, of course. But the g... See more