What is it about those moments of breathtaking beauty within our lives that make them so elusive to description?

In this book, we shall argue that we know the answer. And it is this: such moments must defy description: were they not so resistant they'd fail their own birthing. Their nature stands apart from problem-solving. It is, instead and indeed, one of enigma. Breathtaking beauty, the sublime, is an experience of enigma.

And here we go further: the same is true of, lives at the heart of, the experience of loss ? what we shall call essential, natural grief ? sublime sadness. The sublime is as true of those moments of breathtaking beauty as it is of those at the very core of grief: they partake of a oneness. That is the argument we present.

We write descriptively to set contexts for an experience and a way to understand it, but our argument on its behalf cannot come to rest on those descriptive words however they're formulated. The argument must evoke the feeling it's addressing. And to do that we make use of the arts ? just a tiny few of their many, many sublime fragments ? literary, visual, and musical.

We co-authors are friends. We share a lifelong passion for the arts. Two of us are psychotherapists, two of us are musicians, one is a physician of 50 years' experience, and one taught music theory and history for decades. In an extended Introduction to the book, we describe how the theme for the argument we've just described came to our minds and from there became a topic for our conversations. We've put this book together by retaining each of us an individual voice, as if it were an extended conversation-of-monologues (if that's not self-contradictory). In short, we've authored the book's chapters individually, teaching ourselves, as we've done so, how to make use of a language for grief and the sublime, something we came to hold in common.