LIVING FAREWELL: Diary of a Sense of Time

Farewell is always and everywhere. Every evening we say goodbye to the day. Every morning we bid farewell to the night. We part with jobs, seasons, apartments, dreams, cities – with youth, strength, time, with untouched nature, with earlier versions of ourselves. Children go out into the world, parents into death, lovers to the next woman or man. No one escapes the final farewell anyway. “Sometimes I practice dying”, writes the author.
And now we are also saying farewell to the certainty of peace and to the certainty of liberal democracy. Farewells are our daily companions and teachers. But farewell is not only loss and sadness – it can also be liberating. Far too often we forget the new beginning that lies within farewell. We overlook the freedom that comes with uncertainty.
In her diary, Gabriele von Arnim writes for a year about farewells – about fears of the present and the struggle to maintain confidence in the future, about farewells from oneself, from the joy of life, and about the inevitability of the final farewell.