Book Review: Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain
Susan Cain is the author of one of the most profound and personally significant books I’ve read in recent years: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In this volume she inverts another popular trope, namely that melancholia is inherently destructive, demonstrating through various examples as well as personal testimony the efficacy of bittersweet moods in the creative process and in the navigation of life in general. According to Cain, she obtained inspiration for the book as she pondered the conundrum of why sad, poignant music is often so inspirational. She attributes it to a yearning for a “perfect and beautiful world,” or, as she quotes the mythologist Joseph Campbell, our desire to “participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.”
The primary definition of poignant in the online Merriam-Webster dictionary is “painfully affecting the feeling: piercing; deeply affecting: touching.” I feel this way often when something in a book or film brings back memories of when my kids were young. We were so busy raising them, and yet those were the most fulfilling years of my life. Tears stream down my cheeks as I realize how much I miss those days. Plato expressed it as “a yearning desire for something wonderful we can’t have.” C.S. Lewis called it an “inconsolable longing for we know not what.” Sufi Ibn Arabi referred to “the pain of separation as a spiritual opening.” Saint Teresa of Avila put it like this: “God wounds the soul but the soul longs to die of this beautiful wound.” Cain offers these examples and many more in her analysis of what makes the bittersweet so important.
In response to Leonard Cohen’s touching lyrics Cain says, “Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering.” She points out studies showing that sadness drives creativity. “It’s not that pain equals art. It’s that creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.” She emphasizes that a teacher (or by extension a writer or other artist) needs to understand suffering.
In one section of the book, Cain dissects the American myth of positivity, success, and disdain for so-called losers. This is a cover-up and weakness, of course, because Americans experience as much sadness, despair, and loss, if not more, than people in the rest of the world, and the duplicity of the pseudo-success cover-up makes it more difficult for Americans to heal through honestly accessing their emotions.
I relate to some parts of the book more than others. For instance, Cain expends considerable effort detailing elite seminars she attends that only the wealthy would be able to afford. I also found it difficult to get into her description of a bizarre cult of “immortalists,” also known as radical life extension advocates or super-longevity enthusiasts – people who believe they can live forever and expend considerable effort to make that happen. Unfortunately, this causes them to eschew the bittersweet in their desire for eternal life. Cain counterbalances this extreme viewpoint by extolling the value of grief and impermanence in the following chapter. She points out that you can’t necessarily move on from profound grief; you carry it with you and it becomes part of you.
In the end, Cain raises the question: “What are you longing for?” She challenges readers to write the word “home” at the top of a piece of paper and imagine what they would write next. I thought about this for a long time. I don’t really consider the apartment where I currently live to be home, at least not more than an interim home. The house where I grew up as a child was a real home, and the houses where my wife and I raised our kids in Greece were true homes. Now? I couldn’t really pin down a particular place that I would call home. When I roamed the world as a young man I had a different concept of home. As I wrote in my memoir World Without Pain: “And home? I couldn’t go home again. Home was an abstraction from which one commenced a particular stage of the journey, not an absolute.”
A conundrum, to be sure. But that’s the value of this book. It makes you think, but even more: it makes you feel. And it helps you to realize that your feelings, both joyous and bittersweet, are essential elements in your journey through life.
