"He was weary, unable to keep a grip, but also unsleepy, and with no particular place to go, he would follow the musical figure to his 'magic swirling ship,' out to the inspired windy beach beyond crazy sorrow," he writes murderously of "Mr. Tambourine Man".
"It is no wonder that the left wing in Israel let out a painful cry yesterday: beyond the sorrow at Peres's bad luck, people were afflicted by the same sense of self-pity that seized them after Rabin's assassination".
What's more, Faulkner does not stop until he has in these five sentences exploded outward, into death and sex and Jesus and sorrow, beyond race, beyond even his ruined characters, and into the whole mystery of our humanity".
Handke's memoir about his deceased mother, Wunschloses Unglück (1972; "Wishless Un-luck"; Eng. trans. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams), is also an effective work.
Soon there come sounds just beyond articulation, of sorrow and joy and wonder, summoned from wood and string by the children of Newark, Ohio.
(While working on it, she read Peter Handke's classic about his mother's suicide, "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," another record of a silent, lost woman).
She has the joyful part covered, but in the more mystical moments, even those untarnished by partnering mishaps, she needs a greater range of feeling that moves beyond expressions of sorrow or worry.
The best of these — Jamaica Kincaid's "My Brother" and Peter Handke's "Sorrow Beyond Dreams" — aren't just sad stories; they're attempts to write one's way out of the crisis.
It was the naked pain -- the expression of "a sorrow beyond dreams" to borrow from Peter Handke -- in the face of Julie Walters, portraying a woman forced to admit both the death of a son and her husband's complicity in it.
