Absence

is just another merciful form of presence

A new, unpublished essay

Photo: © David Whyte

Absence

is just another merciful form of presence. Absence is simply at one end of the gradient between grief and love: the mirror presence that allows us to understand how deeply in love we are with another, with the world, or with a previous life. In the depths of real absence the prisoner comes to realise how much they loved the sky, the bereaved widow finds all the years compressed into the single essential way she yearns for the presence of her husband, and the newly in love, in even the shortest separation, find a felt agony as sharp as anything they have ever experienced.