Becoming intimate with fear

—Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.)  Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value * Maggie Nelson: I’ve often written about things that terrify me—likely out of compulsion more than hope for comfort, or catharsis; as Peter Handke says near the end of his horrified memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,…

A Sorrow Beyond Dreams

SHORT VERSION: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) is a stroke of genius! LONGER: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a short story about the suicide of a poor, sad and disillusioned Austrian woman who happened also to be Peter Handke’s mother. The book was written in 1972, shortly after the woman’s death. This…