Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries Against Despair

by Christian Wiman

Instead of spirit animating and brimming from matter, what if, sometimes, it is trapped within it? Many writers have written about the liberating experience of great art, but what if we are not the only ones being freed? “The feeling remains,” wrote Teresa of Ávila, “that God is on the journey too.”

Sometimes a season seems a gust of wind, sometimes a lifetime gravitates to one noon’s green. Some griefs are keepsakes from a place you’ve never been. Some luck is love incompletely seen.

True hope goes backward as well as forward. It can transfigure a past we thought was petrified. It can give voice to certain silences or make us more fluent in silence itself.

Mostly, though, even though the room was loud and we were speaking, I have the sense of silence—a vast and essentially lifelong silence—in which our various madnesses grappled like tarantulas on the table between us.