Consolatio

Khalil Gibran: When you part from your friend

When you part from your friend,
you grieve not;
for that which you love most in him
may be clearer in his absence,
as the mountain to the climber
is clearer from the plain.

  --Khalil Gibran (1883-1931), The Prophet (1923), On Friendship

Rupert Brooke: If I should die, think only this of me

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
that is forever England. There shall be
in that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
a dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;
a body of England's breathing English air,
washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
a pulse in the eternal mind, no less
gives back somewhere the thoughts by England given;
her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
and laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
in hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

        --Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Elizabeth Gilbert: Sadness is a place

I explained that deep grief sometimes is almost like a specific location, a coordinate on a map of time. When you are standing in that forest of grief, you cannot imagine that you could ever find your way to some better place. But if someone can assure you that they themselves have stood in that same place, and now moved on, sometimes this will bring you hope.

"So sadness is a place?" Giovanni asked.

"Sometimes people live there for years," I said.

        --From Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia, by Elizabeth Gilbert (1969)