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Grief is existing in a world made dimmer by having no place for us to cast the light of our gaze.

Menschen

The world, once a labyrinth of infinite and interwoven meanings, now stands before me as a palimpsest erased by an unseen hand, its colors drained into some vast and secret abyss. It is as if the sun has withdrawn behind a veil of shadow, and the days stretch on in an interminable dusk. This, I surmise, is the nature of grief: not the violent rupture of reality, but the slow dimming of its flame, the quiet dissolution of the ability to see and to engage with the intricate and merciless machinery of existence.

Before this eclipse, the world was a mirror in which I discerned the fiery reflection of my own being. My gaze, sharp as the edge of a celestial blade, sought out the delicate architectures of pattern and meaning. In the chaos, it revealed a kind of order; in the mundane, it uncovered the sacred. Each object was a vessel of potential, brimming with the luminous substance of discovery. My eyes, as ancient poets might say, were the light that animated the world’s dream.

But now, that light has faltered, extinguished by an invisible hand. The world lies before me, not as a living labyrinth of wonders but as a lifeless plain—flat, monotonous, stripped of its once-unfathomable depths. The objects that once spoke to me in secret languages are mute now, their forms emptied of significance. They are relics, bereft of life, scattered like the dust of forgotten empires. The radiant tapestry of existence has unraveled into a gray and endless monotony, its weave now loose, its brilliance now faded.

This dimming is not merely of the senses; it is the dimming of the soul itself. My vision, once a torch carried boldly into the dark, now flickers weakly, unable to pierce even the shallow shadows. My gaze drifts like a ship forsaken by its pilot, aimlessly navigating a sea of indifference. Where once the world invited my attention with its myriad enticements, it now seems a vast expanse of resistance—neither welcoming nor hostile, but profoundly indifferent.

I wander now as a shadow of myself, a twilight creature in a world that neither acknowledges nor resists my presence. I search in vain for a flicker of meaning, for some point of resistance against which my gaze might press and find purchase. But the world, exhausted by my relentless inquiries, offers no echo, no response. It is an infinite silence, a reflection of the void within.

This is the perceptibility of grief: a loss of the ability to see, to truly engage with the world, to find meaning in the face of its unveiled indifference. The light of perception, once the divine act of creation itself, now falters in the face of a universe that neither beckons nor denies but simply is. To grieve, then, is not only to lose what one loves, but to lose the ability to illuminate—to descend into a shadowed existence where the gaze falls upon the world and finds nothing to hold, nothing to make whole. This ultimate revelation, that is, the stripping away of the world’s illusions, hollows what once was hallowed.