温德尔·贝里谈挚爱离去与生命中的爱

To love is to sign a contract with loss. To love anyway is both the great tragedy and the great triumph of life. When two people have loved one another, each has become embedded in the marrow of the other’s being and both have had a profound experience that cannot be unhad even when the slender thread of grace between them is severed, by death or disenchantment. “No one you love is ever dead,” Hemingway wrote in his moving meditation on death and the meaning of life disguised as a letter of consolation to a bereaved friend. Art from An Almanac of Birds: 100 Divinations for Uncertain Days. Death, of course, is only one species of loss, one way our loved ones can leave us. We can also be left in life, left behind, left wondering where love goes when it goes. At its most discomposing, abandonment can feel like a living death. All deep loss has one thing in common: It opens an absence so acutely felt it kidnaps us from presence, takes us away from our own lives and their insistent, inconvenient, sacred ongoingness. In memory or in fantasy, we end up refugees from reality, ceding the only thing that is ever ours for the keeping: the living moment. In all missing, we miss life. That is what the achingly missed Wendell Berry (August 5, 1934–August 31, 2026) explores in this gasp of a poem, originally published in the November 17, 2025 issue of The New Yorker: THE LOVED ONES by Wendell Berry The loved ones we call the dead depart from us and for a while are absent. And then as if called back by our love, they come near us again. They enter our dreams. We feel they have been near us when we have not thought of them. They are simply here, simply waiting while we are distracted among our obligations. At last it comes to us: They live now in the permanent world. We are the absent ones. Couple with physicist Richard Feynman’s extraordinary love letter to his wife written long after her untimely death, then revisit Wendell Berry on creativity and love and his timeless antidote to despair. donating = lovingFor seventeen years, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the outgrown name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference. newsletter The Marginalian has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s most inspiring reading. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.