In The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests, Dr. Arthur Kleinman writes a chapter on “The Quest for Care.” The book takes its origin from a long-running course at Harvard, “Quests for Wisdom: Religious, Moral, and Aesthetic Experiences and the Art of Living in Perilous Times.” Team-taught by four professors in disciplines ranging from psychiatry, social medicine, religion, and cultural studies, the course itself has struggled through current issues with pandemic, race relations, and war.
In this age of generative artificial intelligence, he ponders the question of how we generate wisdom. He says, “…it is not a generative time for wisdom, [that] experience-based knowledge that can help us craft lives of purpose or engage in the art of living. Wisdom enables us to make sense of our innermost feelings, respond to tragedy, transcend the grief of deeply personal loss, cultivate meaning in a relationship or find it in a thing, aspire for joy, or prepare to die.” While technology-based information helps us to live more efficiently, this practical knowledge helps us to live more purposeful, ethical, and beautiful lives.
Kleinman speaks on grief as one of the great quests of life—a search for meaning. Following the devastating loss of his wife to early-onset Alzheimer’s and the tragic death of a student and colleague that he mentored, he says of those difficult and perilous times:
“The anguish and poignancy of that painful search made me aware of something I had failed to understand from my research and clinical experience: that bereavement is a continuation of care, though it is caring for memories. Memories, in the process of grieving, are incessantly worked through, assembled into a story, and told to oneself and to others as a way of controlling unruly emotions that threaten to overwhelm and further break one. Memory in this instance is visceral, meaning gut and muscle memory, the body’s own wisdom, which makes it possible to transcend grief and rebuild a life.”
“…bereavement is a continuation of care…”
~ Arthur Kleinman
In my own life with the passing of first my mother and then my father, I also turn to those memories in the process of grief as a source of both pain and joy. I assemble them into story; in my case, not just for myself, but to share their practical wisdom with others on the performance stage and all the smaller stages of life created in the moments with friends sharing a meal, sitting on the sofa, or walking the neighborhood. The quest for wisdom is not new; the wisdom of generations passes through my parents and through me. If bereavement is a quest for wisdom, it is story that transmits the wisdom of healing.
References
- “What Paul Farmer and Joan Kleinman Taught Arthur Kleinman about Wisdom,” Harvard Gazette
- The Practice of Wisdom: Five Quests by Davíd Carrasco, Arthur Kleinman, Stephanie Paulsell, Michael Puett