Amalie Gabel

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1926-1976

In the escalation of Bishop’s poem, it is not just the potential roads in front of us that seem to disappear, but also what is supposedly behind us, the mountains of our pasts. Names and places that used to matter.

When all these possible futures that we feel entitled to experience slowly crumple, we need the casual resilience shown in the poem. We see this resilience through the poem’s pretended lightness in dealing with minor as well as major losses. The tactile feel of a sweater, the smell it carried or the memory of a loved one wearing it, it all blurs together.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1926-1976

Accepting loss is also slowly accepting the loss of hope for other futures. When you lose something, you don’t just lose the thing itself, but also all the tentacles attached to it; all the futures you imagined yourself to have with it.

We lost a world, and with it, we lost all the futures we saw in it. We have to get used to a new way of life; half the time forgetting that we are not supposed to touch people, things, and the other half forgetting, temporarily, that it has ever been different; finding films, or books to be unrealistic when they are not aware of the isolation restrictions.

Not being around people is only half an existence. It is waiting for that thing to happen. The bell to ring, letting us all out of class.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster”

One Art, Elizabeth Bishop, The Complete Poems 1926-1976