the art of losing

I'm starting to find a disturbing thread running through the books and music I love (or have loved). King Lear, Disgrace, Age of Iron, What I Loved, Celan's poetry, Fugitive Pieces, W;t, Barabbas, the book of Job, Hopkins' 'Pitched past pitch of grief', Beethoven's final piano sonatas, the Schubert sonata as played by Richter that I'm currently obsessed with. What all of these have in common is a desolation (or in some cases, a transcendent bareness) that comes from the experience of searing, harrowing loss. In so many of these works, the protagonist is stripped of everything that s/he ever valued, everything that shored up his/her sense of self. (Ok, maybe it's hard to see / hear that happening in the music, but the music I love so often has an austerity to it that could be attributed to a desire to communicate that feeling of being stripped bare in musical language.)

So what's with this obsession with loss? I really don't know - perhaps it's because that kind of loss has something so elemental about it. One feels a kind of purgation reading about it. Though I'd be the first to say, good to encounter in art, and let's hope that's as far as it ever gets.
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