Grief, like Covid-19, mutates and escapes the inoculation of both time and the reassurance of loving friends. It is less sledgehammer and more screwdriver, drilling little holes in your head and heart, leaving you haunted by the ifs and buts of your decisions.
Interpretation
Grief evolves and affects us deeply, leaving lasting emotional scars regardless of time or support from others.
In this quote, Barkha Dutt compares the nature of grief to the mutability of a virus, emphasizing how grief can change over time and evade remedies. It suggests that while we may receive support and comfort from friends, the emotional pain often persists in subtle, invasive ways, leading to constant reflection on our past choices and regrets.
In practice
In a memorial speech to honor a loved one, this quote could illustrate the enduring nature of grief.
It's never said out aloud, or in so many words, but for many urban, upper caste Indians, 'the backwards' are precisely that - citizens of the hinterland, ungainly and otherworldly - an inconvenient blemish on their shining, gleaming future.
Living on a planet of fixed size requires compromise, and while we are the only party capable of negotiating, we are not the only party at the table. We've never claimed more, and we've never had less.
To live as one likes is plebian the noble man aspires to order and law.
For my future I have no concern, and as a true philosopher, I never would have any, for I know not what it may be: as a Christian, on the other hand, faith must believe without discussion, and the stronger it is, the more it keeps silent.
I am not interested in the past. I am interested in the future, for that is where I expect to spend the rest of my life.
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
No system of religion should go in partnership with barbarism. Neither should any Christian feel it his duty to defend the savagery of the past.
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