Dec 28, 2025
Still Licking the Air
One of these days — which lasted seven years — I wrote a PhD thesis. The story of that thesis is a mini-novel in itself. That is not the story I am going to write. But something funny happened. Some earlier version of me wrote a great deal; the only poem I ever wrote won a national prize in my country, Brazil — another epic I will not write today. At some point, that version of me was lost.
After that day that lasted seven years, after I handed in that damn thesis, I stopped dreaming in mental images and started dreaming in text, for days in a row, describing experiences of what grief is. I think I know why I did this. My thesis began with the hypothesis that certain pathologies are nothing more than magnifying glasses that exaggerate things that usually go unnoticed in what we might call a natural orientation. I told the reader that, at the end, I would explain what I thought pathologies of fear conceal about the experience of time.
When I reached the conclusion, I began to talk — and talk — about a masterpiece of German philosophy, Schelling’s The Ages of the World, which teaches us how we are sometimes not contemporaneous with ourselves: lost between a past that keeps being replicated and an incapacity to make a decision that would open a new present, one that is created and chosen. I drew a comparison with grief, because it gathers an affective circuit in the present in which one of its elements has been forced, by life, to remain in the past. You are left in that mismatch between a love that still is and a love-object that you have been told is no longer.
I have played with this idea before. I used to think that the biggest everyday stupidity that tells you what grief is happens when you are licking an ice-cream cone and, all of a sudden, it falls to the ground. You just stand there for a few seconds, staring at nothing, trying to process it, looking foolish. For me, grief is those seconds in which you try to understand that the ice cream you were licking in an almost fusional ritual is no longer there — except that those seconds last for years, and the ice cream has been replaced by a loss that keeps reenacting its fall inside you, again and again, as if gravity had become a personality trait.
I have no idea why this unraveled into days and days of dreams without images, but I wondered whether it wasn’t a version of me that wanted, well, to keep writing a lousy story. Maybe.
My grandmother died while I was giving a talk at the Psychiatry and Philosophy group in Heidelberg. It wasn’t about grief; it was about trauma. A colleague I never saw again tried to console me, saying that for him grief was not something lived only internally, but more like a floating emotion that seeps in and floods you from the sides. When I heard him say that, I thought I had been flooded by the entire Neckar river in one afternoon.
In my waking life, I never wanted to keep telling that story. I think the griefs I now live most intensely are those small adult griefs, when you want — or love — something or someone very, very much, but you have to let it die, and everything becomes an effort to mourn the life you wanted to live and did not live. Adulthood has a lot to do with giving up.
I really think this is the biggest lump in the throat of being an adult: sometimes things go wrong, you can cry, and no other adult comes to pick you up and tell you that everything is fine. In fact, you realize alone it is probably worse than it seems and it will cost two thousand euros to fix, if it can be fixed at all.
I don’t have much to say about grief today, actually. Maybe all those dreams were about how I went through an unconscious mourning for a self that used to write, and it came back to tell me that it didn’t die. I think I like this version better. In fact, I think I study memory because I struggle deeply with this business of things being here and then, shortly after, no longer being here. I could never start a blog about it . I would have to reveal myself entirely, and I don’t even know whether anything would be left.
So I’ll simplify: the self in me that writes is present, not past, and that is why it lives.