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For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Wounded into art: this is how the poet W. H. Auden described the haunted obsession to create (Sacks 2015). As analysts, we understand: we see those wounded into treatment. But as Freud observed, the mystery of the artist will always be beyond us. Still, Georges Perec's and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis's intersecting paths to creativity, rooted in the soil of loss and grief, are of great interest to us. And Henry P. Schwartz has shown us this with exemplary sensitivity and scholarly thoroughness.
When I was invited to comment on Schwartz's papers, I was unsure if his subject was something I wanted to spend time with; but once I read them, I was immediately won over. I was taken with the elegance of Schwartz's writing and thinking, his sculpting a vast amount of material, choosing what to include and highlight, what to take out, creating a