Avital Ronell

I used to study weather and the scandalous beginnings of weather forecasting. Do you know who set up the first meteorological prediction center? My main man, Goethe. At the time, in the 18th-century, the very idea of grasping weather competed with the prerogatives of the gods. Mortals should not have access to such clusters of immateriality, it was thought. Only gods and poets should try to divine weather conditions.

The inability to mourn or let go is sometimes called melancholy. Many of us have slipped into states of melancholic depression for one reason or another, for one unreason or another—one cannot always nail the object that has been lost or causes pain.

In America, we are often encouraged to “let go,” “move on,” “get over it,” even to “get a life,” locutions that indicate a national intolerance for prolonged states of mourning. Yet the quickened pace of letting go may well mean that we have not let go, that we are haunted and hounded by unmetabolized aspects of loss.

Nearly every philosophy I have known has built a sanctuary, however remote and uncharted, for the experience of mourning.

-Avital Ronell, NYT Stormy Weather: Blues in Winter

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