On crying

What moves you to tears?

I’m sneaking in a bonus personal post this week. Normal historical service will be resumed imminently – more Paston Letters incoming – but last week, for me, was an unusually weepy one, for an unusual range of reasons.

15th-century stained glass at Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk

In reverse order, chronologically: thank you to everyone who sent sustaining thoughts to my son for the Boat Race on Sunday. He and his boys in light blue put on an extraordinary performance while his mother, watching through her fingers from behind the sofa, got more than a little misty-eyed.

I’d have been fine after that – FINE, I tell you – if the cameras hadn’t cut to last year’s Cambridge president struggling to talk through tears; then to the cox’s father with an audible lump in his throat; then to one of the PGCE students who’d been excluded from the race (a long and unedifying story) being consoled by his teammates at the finish line.

Seb Benzecry, CUBC president 2023-4, combining fine analysis for BBC Sport with understandable emotion

As chance would have it, I’d also begun the week by thinking about crying, and the huge range of reasons we humans do it, as a guest of the writer Ella Frears on the superbly named Tears For Frears (geddit?), a Rough Trade Books show on Soho Radio.

The premise is simple: two guests each choose three songs and one piece of writing that make them cry.

The process is anything but. To be moved by words or music is a broadly familiar thing; to be moved specifically to tears, an entirely distinct experience. It took me weeks to pin down my choices and attempt to articulate the various effects they have on me.

Two observations:

1. For me, tears come – I think – from the place where love meets the inexorable passing of time.

2. Most of the songs I listen to every day, I’d say, are by women. But all the songs I chose in response to this question were by men. Even if Robert Smith is right that boys don’t cry (and Cambridge University Boat Club would beg to differ), apparently they’re the ones who make me do it.

So, for the music, please listen to the show here – and tell me what your choices are, and why? I’ll stick mine at the end, in case you want to cut to the chase.

Detail from The Descent from the Cross by Rogier van der Weyden, c. 1435

The writing was a different matter.

I was thrilled to add to my reading list Ella’s remarkable book Goodlord and my fellow guest Joe Dunthorne’s extraordinary new Children of Radium, and I urge you to do the same.

But choosing some words that move me to tears proved unexpectedly tricky, because guests not only have to choose: they then have to read the piece out loud on air.

That kiboshed the first idea that came to mind. I’d just read Bleak House, and the death of young Jo the crossing sweeper had left me howling inconsolably. But when I tried to practise reading the pages aloud, I howled again. And then again. It also dawned on me that my valiant attempt at Jo’s Dickensian cockney was likely to leave my companions on the show howling for a different reason. Some griefs, it turns out, are better left private.

I went back to the drawing board – only to realise the solution was close at hand.

I’m married to a poet. (As Ella said, there’s a sentence to set alarm bells ringing in a host’s ears. But she was kind enough to say that she was quickly reassured by reading on, while Joe pointed out that I should probably give his name, rather than only ever calling him ‘my husband’. Grateful thanks from both of us to both of them.)

Anyway, before you leave your own nominations in the comments (please and thank you), here’s a poem that moved me deeply the first time I read it, and every time since, ongoingly, differently, and more.

It’s from Airstream Land Yacht, by Ken Babstock.

Compatibilist

Awareness was intermittent. It sputtered.
And some of the time you were seen
asleep. So trying to appear whole

you asked of the morning: Is he free
who is not free from pain? It started to rain
a particulate alloy of flecked grey: the dogs

wanted out into their atlas of smells; to pee
where before they had peed, and might
well pee again—though it isn't

a certainty. What is? In the set,
called Phi, of all possible physical worlds
resembling this one, in which, at time t,

was written 'Is he free who is not free—'
and comes the cramp. Do you want
to be singular, onstage, praised,

or blamed? I watched a field of sun-
flowers dial their ruddy faces toward
what they needed and was good. At noon

they were chalices upturned, gilt-edged, 
and I lived in that same light but felt 
alone. I chose to phone my brother,

over whom I worried, and say so.
He whispered, lacked affect. He'd lost
my record collection to looming debt. I

forgave him—through weak connections,
through buzz and oceanic crackle—
immediately, without choosing to,

because it was him I hadn't lost; and
later cried myself to sleep. In that village
near Dijon, called Valley of Peace,

a pond reflected its dragonflies
over a black surface at night, and
the nuclear reactor's far-off halo

of green light changed the night sky
to the west. A pony brayed, stamping
a hoof on inlaid stone. The river's reeds

lovely, but unswimmable. World death 
on the event horizon; vigils with candles
in cups. I've mostly replaced my records,

and acted in ways I can't account for.
Cannot account for what you're about
to do. We should be held and forgiven.