These of us who’ve lived with despair understand how it blindfolds us to magnificence, the best way it muffles the tune of life, till we’re left within the solitary confinement of our personal somber ruminations, all of the world a clean. It’d really feel just like the visitation of some monster, however it isn’t one thing that occurs upon us from the surface — it’s our personal undulating neurochemistry, it’s the components of ourselves we’ve got not but befriended, built-in, understood. “The grey drizzle of horror induced by despair takes on the standard of bodily ache,” William Styron wrote in his timeless account of despair. The ache can really feel interminable. It’s a lifeline to keep in mind that it isn’t — that there may be an different facet, that the blindfold and the muffler can come off similar to they got here on.

That’s what Swedish-born, London-based printmaker and graphic artist Staffan Gnosspelius explores with nice subtlety and soulfulness in Bear (public library) — a wordless picture-book for grownups about life with and liberation from despair.

We meet a bear with a physique bent within the form of sorrow and a cone on its head — a cone that received’t come off, solely plunging the bear deeper into despair with every failed try.

In the future, a white rabbit comes alongside and tries to assist the bear take the cone off, however the small creature is powerless to take away it by power — the cone stays, and thru it the bear growls the terrifying growl of menacing despair, terrifying his new buddy.

So blinded to the fact of the wilderness, the bear involves understand the branches of the timber because the tentacles of some monstrous octopus and the blades of the grass as an assault of sharp swords.

Nonetheless, the rabbit persists, embracing the bear’s massive cone-bowed physique and easily being close to, bearing witness to the struggling — that greatest support for a buddy in sorrow.

Watching its buddy battle, the rabbit begins gently singing to the bear.

In all places bear and cone go, rabbit and tune go.

However when the bear tries to sing again by means of the cone, solely these terrifying growls come out.

And they also proceed — the sorrowing bear, the singing rabbit — till at some point a entice within the forest snaps shut on the bear’s foot.

It’s then, as ache mounts onto ache and turns into insufferable, that one thing breaks open within the bear and it sings out for assist.

Throughout the forest, the rabbit hears the faint tune and rushes over to launch its buddy.

Let out, the bear thanks the singing rabbit and timidly begins singing again, till a storm of tune fills the forest — that nice operatic scream of catalytic launch, primal and numinous.

So it’s that the tune of life begins singing itself by means of the bear and the cone comes gently off — a young reminder that nobody can save anybody, not even with love; that we solely ever save ourselves after we are prepared: however love is what readies us to be our personal savior.

Complement Bear with Bloom — a touching animated quick movie about despair and what it takes to recuperate the sunshine of being — and The Rabbit Field — a wondrous classic picture-book for grownups in regards to the thriller of life — then revisit a few of humanity’s most beloved writers on the mightiest antidote to despair.