Lost & Found: Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness

by Kathryn Schulz

Lately I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion—or, rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and the Japanese call mono no aware. It is the feeling of registering, on the basis of some slight exposure, our existential condition: how lovely life is, and how fragile, and how fleeting. Although this feeling is partly a response to our place in the universe, it is not quite the same as awe, because it has too much of the everyday in it, and too much sorrow, too. For the same reason, it is also not the feeling the Romantics identified as the sublime—a mingling of admiration and dread, evoked by the vast impersonal grandeur of the physical world. This feeling I am talking about has none of that splendor or terror in it. It is made up, instead, of gratitude, longing, and a note I can only call anticipatory grief. Among English words, its nearest kin might be “bittersweet,” a translation of the Greek term Sappho coined to describe the experience of falling in love; it was she who first and forever soldered love’s joy to love’s suffering. But while “bittersweet” accurately captures the mingling of happiness and sadness in this feeling, its intimate origin means that it lacks the necessary world-facing aspect, the sense of the scale ...