Crying: A Natural & Cultural History of Tears Book

This provocative and indispensable book provides a natural and cultural history of our most mysterious and complex human function: our ability to shed tears. All humans, and only humans, weep. Tears are sometimes considered pleasurable, sometimes dangerous, mysterious, deceptive, or profound. Tears of happiness, tears of joy, the proud tears of a parent, tears of mourning, tears of laughter, tears of defeat --what do they have in common? Why is it that at times of victory, success, love, reunion, and celebration the outward signs of our emotions are identical to those of our most profound experiences of loss? Why We Cry looks at the many different ways people have understood weeping, from the earliest known representation of tears in the fourteenth century B.C. through the latest neurophysiological research. While probing the minds of philosophers, poets, scholars, scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists, Thomas Lutz at the same time considers the multifaceted cultural meaning of tears. He visits literary texts from Homer and Shakespeare to the sentimental novels and poetry of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and turns his eye on films from the "weepies" of the 1930s through Titanic. Tears help us engage and escape; they help us express and repress; they accompany sincerity and duplicity. Despite our most common romantic assumptions, what this brilliant book tells us is that tears are never pure, they are never simple.