THE ART OF LOOSING
One Art
‘The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.’
Elizabeth Bishop
Yesterday I lost my leather fur lined cap. Took it off in the library then wondered off without it.
I loved this cap which was a present from someone whom I cared about deeply, its loss intertwined now with the greater loss of that relationship, so that last night I mourned for both.
In one of his lectures on the family the American archetypal psychologist James Hillman talks about the roots of family, that in its Greek and Roman origins family included not only blood relations but servants, animals and the inanimate objects that went to make up the household. This feels absolutely right at gut level, that chest of drawers or that table with the elaborately carved legs, they are all part of the family, hence all those acrimonious disputes during the divorce or after the wake about who gets the Victorian grandfather clock or walnut television cupboard and how incongruous it is to see that old familiar hat stand in someone else’s home, property here definitely as theft. Better that it were buried with the old man Pharaoh style; ownership suddenly feeling disturbingly transient, as of course it actually is.
Clothes too are welcomed into the family, some becoming more integrated into family life than others, that favoured coat or sweater, those lovingly cared for leather boots.
So as to my lost cap I now take time to curse the person who found it and did not have the charity to hand it in at the desk, may their crops rot in the fields and their milking cows dry up, or the urban equivalent of these things and I say farewell to my lovely leather cap which I will never wear again. ‘The art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.’
‘The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.’
Elizabeth Bishop
Yesterday I lost my leather fur lined cap. Took it off in the library then wondered off without it.
I loved this cap which was a present from someone whom I cared about deeply, its loss intertwined now with the greater loss of that relationship, so that last night I mourned for both.
In one of his lectures on the family the American archetypal psychologist James Hillman talks about the roots of family, that in its Greek and Roman origins family included not only blood relations but servants, animals and the inanimate objects that went to make up the household. This feels absolutely right at gut level, that chest of drawers or that table with the elaborately carved legs, they are all part of the family, hence all those acrimonious disputes during the divorce or after the wake about who gets the Victorian grandfather clock or walnut television cupboard and how incongruous it is to see that old familiar hat stand in someone else’s home, property here definitely as theft. Better that it were buried with the old man Pharaoh style; ownership suddenly feeling disturbingly transient, as of course it actually is.
Clothes too are welcomed into the family, some becoming more integrated into family life than others, that favoured coat or sweater, those lovingly cared for leather boots.
So as to my lost cap I now take time to curse the person who found it and did not have the charity to hand it in at the desk, may their crops rot in the fields and their milking cows dry up, or the urban equivalent of these things and I say farewell to my lovely leather cap which I will never wear again. ‘The art of losing's not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.’
