The lost art of tenderness and grief

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime
jamais je ne t’oublierai

A la claire fontaine

I need all the time I have and a thousand times more than all the time I have and most of all I’d like to have all the time there is just for you, for thinking about you, for breathing in you.

Franz Kafka to Milena Jesenská – Letters to Milena

‘Long have I loved you, never will I forget you.’ The words of the well-known French chanson fall like a soft rain while retaining all the solemnity of a promise. There is a deeply touching element to its extraordinary simplicity, to the melancholy lilting of its melody. The chanson is a tender plea like a child with outstretched hands waiting for its mother’s caressing embrace. In the very same way it is direct and unassuming, humbled before the cathartic presence of a quiet grief that resembles a beaten rose – a glistening raindrop gently kissing the velvet folds of a petal, bending the head of the flower towards the ground by its weight, yet at the same time enhancing the contours of the rose’s beauty like no ray of luminescence could. Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai. I know of no words of love, of no promise more simple and straightforward, trembling in an echo of a tender memory.

I made the wonderful discovery of A la claire fontaine while watching the movie adaptation of William Somerset Maugham’s novella The Painted Veil which I read a few years ago. I remember being profoundly moved by the delicate chanson from the very first moment, but it was not until a few years later that I came to appreciate in a very personal way the numerous palpable dimensions of feeling and beauty hidden within this seemingly simple poem.

Very often we are reluctant and unwilling to address and acknowledge the presence of grief in our lives, trying to smooth it over like an uncomfortable crease on a silk cloth even though its stabbing, paralysing and overwhelming insistence lurks in the shadow of our footsteps like an abandoned lover. It took me a long time to understand there is no shame in grief, in tears; just the contrary – there is sacredness in those words that are too weighty to be expressed by human language. Grief – that is Abraham taking his beloved son Isaac up Mount Moriah, in an act of unquestioning obedience and trust, to sacrifice him to the One who promised to bless him with fruitful offspring. Grief – that is Christ shedding warm tears in front of Lazarus’s tomb, lying in freezing solitude on the parched ground of the Ghetsemani garden in the sombre shade of olive trees, dying on the cross with a piercing cry that never ceases to shake my whole being – Eli, Eli lama sabachthani. Father, why hast thou forsaken me? Grief – that is the profound loneliness of the Woman under the cross watching her only son being taken into the cold arms of death; it is the river of neverending sorrow and tenderness of La Pietà.

There is sacredness in grief which invites us into a space of halted time and breath, like the delicate chanson does – come, sit by the banks of the river, and let your tears flow like flowerbuds down the stream.

Il y a longtemps que je t’aime, jamais je ne t’oublierai.

There is no time or distance that can heal grief; it can only be acknowledged and accepted as an everyday guest until it becomes our most intimate companion. Then we can truly understand the powerful presence of all its facets – tenderness and gratitude most importantly.

Tenderness and gratitude – those, for me, are most intimately woven and presented in Schubert’s Impromptu in G flat major with a languorous melodic sigh carrying the principal voice through a vast land of luminous, gentle sadness. The very same luminosity can be found only in the eyes of a dying person who peacefully parts with the finite aspect of existence, eyes lovingly caressing the contours of things once so familiar while waiting for the transition to the unknown. That moment of accepting, abandoning, and slowly moving forward, of crossing and transition – that is the land of sadness borne on the fragile breath of Schubert’s supple melodic lines.

The journey can be long and very tiring, there is no doubt about that; but side by side with that loneliness looming large over one’s head like a branch of an old, weather-beaten tree, there is the comfort of its shade, the richness of its autumn colours adorning the crown like a blazing attire. And even when the leaves start falling down in a slow, graceful dance, like in Brahms’s Intermezzo in A major, the trunk stays solid, firmly rooted into the ground, waiting for another season to come.

Brahms – that is the sturdy trunk of the tree, never moving, never broken. It is richness and beauty that is not self-evident, that is earthy and maladroit, but interlaced with moments of such exquisite clearness and delicacy that come like a revelation through the muddy patterns of decisive bass lines, and shine forth all the more brightly precisely thanks to the existing contrast. Late Brahms – as it is the case with this Intermezzo – is a music of acknowledgement, humility and quiet seclusion. It is the last face, the last phase of grief – the phase of intimate companionship where the piercing pain becomes a friend and a counselor; the phase of tenderness blooming through the thicket of a thorny bush. It is elevation, clarity and lucidity that may not chase away all the shadows of the past, but nonetheless try to bathe it in a new light, exciting a beauteous reverberation from all the places of the deepest anguish, transforming it into a melodic line that rises like a foam-capped crest only to break and fall with a soft sigh of acceptance at one’s feet.