The Ache We Are Asked To Keep - The Deeper Thinking Podcast

The Ache We Are Asked to Keep

The Deeper Thinking Podcast

There are stories that don’t hold us. They haunt us.

Watching Song of the Sea with my children, I was met not by plot, but by a presence—the kind of sorrow that lives beneath dialogue, in rhythm, in breath. This episode is not a review. It is not a warning. It is a meditation on the ache that art sometimes lets us keep. Drawing from Aristotle, Kierkegaard, and Levinas, we explore how the most powerful stories do not resolve grief—but remain faithful to it.

This is not about catharsis. It is about consecration. A way of letting sorrow stay unspoken and still be honoured. The episode traces how grief becomes a private language, how film can dismantle rather than console, and how rupture—not recovery—might be art’s most truthful offering. Fidelity to the fracture is not a failure to move on. It is a refusal to erase what still pulses.

For those who have ever cried in the dark and not known why, this episode is a companion. It asks: what if the ache is not what needs fixing—but what deserves fidelity?

What This Offers

• A companion for those who have grieved without explanation
• A rethinking of cinema as a site of ethical witness
• An encounter with philosophy that doesn’t resolve, but stays
• A meditation on grief as intimacy, not illness

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Bibliography

• Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin Classics, 1996.
• Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death. Translated by Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin Books, 2004.
• Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.

Levinas teaches that ethics begins not in recognition, but in interruption. Perhaps grief is that interruption—a face we cannot turn from.

#Grief #Philosophy #SongOfTheSea #Kierkegaard #Aristotle #Levinas #Tragedy #Consecration #UnresolvedAche #TheDeeperThinkingPodcast