Living With Feeling

“I take things out of boxes, but need boxes to put them back in” A light dabble with a search engine on the subject of “tear bottles” will lead you to a world of assertions, often by online shops, about the historical use of “tear bottles” in the mourning rituals of Romans, Greeks and Victorians with stories of how tears were collected in small, stoppered, glass bottles as a sign of respect and grief. They’ve featured in opera designs and art installations and there are at least a couple of references to collected or collecting tears in the Bible including Psalm 56:8 where God is being addressed: Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? John Gill’s mid eighteenth century Exposition of Whole Bible unpicks this with another assertion about the “tear bottle” in the psalm being an allusion “to “lachrymatories”, or tear bottles, in which surviving relatives dropped their tears for their deceased friends, and buried them with their ashes, or in their urns;