At a reader meeting in Barcelona, I received a mug from the PEN Club of Catalonia, with a quote by the American poet Elizabeth Bishop: “The art of losing is not difficult to master.”
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- Ruth Aquinas: A week of mourning for women
The line in a beautiful poem, it begins like this, with a literal translation: “It is not difficult to master the art of losing; many things seem to be done with the intention of losing so that losing them is not a disaster.” It is worth noting Paulo Henrique Brito’s wonderful phrase: “The art of loss is not a mystery; / There are many things that contain within themselves the accident / of their loss, and this loss is not a serious matter.”
In the following lines of the same poem, Bishop lists all that he has lost—all that we lose: hours wasted, journeys never taken, homes, cities, empires, until we reach the most important thing, which is people. These are the people we love. It then becomes clear that the art of losing is, after all, the hardest of all: “Even losing you (the voice that taunted you, the gesture/that I loved) won’t make me lie. Of course/that art of losing is not difficult to master,/though it may—(write this!)—seem like a disaster.”
There is no greater disaster than losing someone. We can survive the loss of a city, yes, even a country, but not a father or mother, let alone a child. An entity remains similar to us, and confuses us, but, deep down, it will always be missing some essential parts.
One of the most interesting figures in current Portuguese music, Catia Mazari Oliveira, decided to change her name to A Garota Não, when she was very young, during a tour in which she sang great MPB songs, she was annoyed by a viewer who insisted on asking her to sing “Garota de Ipanema”. “Not the girl!” Katya shouted, and the explosion ended up becoming a stage name.
- Julio Maria: The wrong message
In several interviews, A Garota Não tells a story about her mother, a cook and seamstress, who one day bought some expensive high-heeled shoes, which she dreamed of wearing to a special occasion, a ball, or a wedding. When her mother died, Katya found the shoebox intact, never opened.
Life did not give this lady the time for the rest she needed to put on her beautiful shoes and finally enter her own party. I think these shoes are not a symbol of frustration, but of tenderness. It’s the perfect picture of what we’ve lost without even knowing it – the dreams we never achieved, the celebrations that never happened, the words that were never said.
When someone dies, we not only lose that person, but also their unreleased projects, their petty egos, and their deferred promises. All your beautiful shoes stay inside the box, untouched, waiting for the day that never comes.
Maybe the art of losing is this: Open that box slowly. Not to lament broken dreams, but to realize the tenderness of desires that were on hold, and that we now have the task of continuing; Or simply to save.