book or taking a walk, I'm crying. Why all this self-pitying now? What's wrong with me? I'm filled with regret and grief. Everything is finally OK. Why can't I just be happy? Why? Wallowing in It Dear Wallowing, I am going to write back to you in an unguarded, meandering way -- even more unguarded and meandering than usual. While from a technical standpoint the unguarded meandering style lacks the punch and sizzle of more carefully wrought prose, I think it is publicly useful for a writer to be able to do this from time to time; so I will offer you a meandering and unguarded glimpse of my own grief. I appreciate your writing about grief, as I have been having periods of intense grief lately, and it's one of those things that we don't write about very often in the mainstream press, and I suspect it is often viewed as a symptom of some pathology, as it may be in some cases, but I am a very high-functioning person, successful and happy, happily married, creative, law-abiding, and twice this week I have plunged into a deep and searing grief that causes me to ask what is going on. In conversation about this with a friend, leaning against my truck (why is it that the best conversations between men occur when we are both leaning against the truck? Is that why I still have the truck -- so we can lean against the fenders of the truck bed and talk?) and I said to him -- and this is only because I trust him not to ridicule me for saying such things -- I said that part of the grief I feel seems like grief for the world, like a grief for all the losses in the world, all the sadness and death, all the dead soldiers and motherless children, all the wanderers and prisoners and the tortured and possessed, the outcast and low-born and blind, the misunderstood, the ones who die in silence in unmarked graves and are searched for eternally by relatives, the ones who die suddenly when not ready, who have not yet had a last meal, who have no time to prepare. Instances of this grief: As I read a simple little story to a group of sympathetic listeners recently, it became nearly impossible to continue because I felt so much grief when reading it. I am not sure whether the story contained this grief, or whether I brought this grief to the story, or used the story as a stage for this grief. I do not know. Another recent instance: As I recounted some early childhood experiences to a trusted intimate recently, I was again overcome by grief. What is this grief? Where does it come from? It seems to be always from the same place, as though grief were a spring flowing backward, taking everything into it, a hole in the forest where everything is going, where everything that is gone can be remembered: The vanishing point, the place where everything that is gone was last seen. The point of departure, the swirling drain of creation. It seems there is a place down which everything goes. This seems to be the place of grief. And it is not regret. It is not shame. It is purer than that. It is not personal. At least that is what I have been feeling. So I wanted to share that in the hope that you may at least give this thing some shape. I do wonder, intellectually, what this phenomenon is, this sudden grieving. (Who has died recently? My dear Aunt Lotte, off a cliff in Austria; my dear David Foster Wallace, a suicide by hanging; my own parents still alive but tragically lost to me; my father-in-law, now ashes over Lower Saxony; so many others who have died and continue to die.) In the quest for some understanding of it, here is a link and a paragraph that you may find interesting: "For [writer Darian] Leader, the nub of the problem is mourning, and the work of mourning, that follows all losses in life, be that from death, the end of relationships, or life's disillusionments. He suggests that the reason depression is on the rise, apart from the dark promotion of the 'condition' by the drug companies, is because as a society we are becoming so bad at mourning. It doesn't fit with our image of what it is to be [a] human being -- autonomous, transparent to science, productive to the economy, and the like. Rising levels of depression should not be responded to by yet more pills but by listening to that depression: it's perhaps a kind of protest against the conditions -- emotional and spiritual, not material -- people are being forced to live in." I am also caused to think about depression because of my grieving for the suicide, by hanging, of David Foster Wallace, and the fact that he was depressed, and that he had been taken off his medication because of the side effects, and that he had been given electroconvulsive shock therapy, and that he had been unable to teach or write, and that he was very funny and very brilliant and that all these things are connected -- that his brilliance and his humor allowed him to seal off and delay grieving whatever secret and well-disguised grief must have hounded him so. We do not know how to mourn; we do it badly if at all; we mostly do not mourn; we are caldrons of grief dangerously dense, inert and cold as stone, ready to irradiate us if its container should crack. I say these things as a poet, not as a practical man. As a practical man I curse the grief that comes over me as I hammer and saw. I curse the grief that comes over me as I drive, forcing me to the side, to sit in the forest in my car and listen to the ping of the engine as it cools amid the sobs that come from someplace I cannot name and have not visited in recent memory. This has nothing to do with how competent we are. It comes from beyond the hammer and the truck and the paycheck. So thank you for writing about grief, and for giving me the opportunity to write about grief, and let me say, too, that as I sit here now I am not cracking up or giving in to it, that I am floating along now, regarding the great, swift emptyin