The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

It’s even oddly empowering—to be reminded that you’re not alone, you’re not crazy, you’re just an ordinary human being trying to make your way through a bizarre set of circumstances.

All words in this dictionary are new.

safe in the knowledge that we’re all lost.

Maybe it should be like skipping a stone across the surface of a lake. It doesn’t matter where it ends up.

n. a random image that becomes lodged deep in your brain—maybe washed there by a dream, or smuggled inside a book, or planted during a casual conversation—which then grows into a wild and impractical vision that keeps scrambling around in your head, itching for a chance to leap headlong into reality. From the title character of the 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, directed by Werner Herzog, about a man who is overcome by the thought of hearing Caruso’s operatic tenor echoing through the Peruvian jungle; to fund this effort he hires local people to pull a steamship over a mountain, a feat that was done for real for the film’s production. Pronounced “fits-kuh-rawl-doh.”

Some days you wake up in Kansas, and some days in Oz.

Best line so far.

idlewild adj. feeling grateful to be stranded in a place where you can’t do much of anything—sitting for hours at an airport gate, the sleeper car of a train, or the backseat of a van on a long road trip—which temporarily alleviates the burden of being able to do anything at any time and frees up your brain to do whatever it wants to do, even if it’s just to flicker your eyes across the passing landscape.

Exellent

Compare Zugunruhe, “migration restlessness,” the

the frustration of being unable to fly,

I used to dream I could fly

They’ll look for the doodles left behind in the margins of our textbooks, and the dandelions pressed in the pages.

I there a name for thes sorrow of not having written in booksall one's adult life?

an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

funkenzwangsvorstellung n. the primal trance of watching a campfire in the dark. German Funken, spark + Zwangsvorstellung, obsession. Pronounced “foon-ken-tsvang-svohr-stel-oong.”

zielschmerz n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.

nementia n. the post-distraction effort to recall the reason you’re feeling particularly anxious or angry or excited, trying to retrace your sequence of thoughts like a kid gathering the string of a downed kite.

n. the act of trying to keep an amazing discovery to yourself, fighting the urge to shout about it from the rooftops because you’re afraid that it’ll end up being diluted and distorted, and will no longer have been created just for you.

To pick away at the literal truth is to miss the point of it, miss the joy of it. So go ahead and build your myth. Try to tell a good story about yourself that captures something true, whether or not the facts agree.

n.

Or perhaps it’s such a privilege to be alive at all that none of us has the right to complain.

there are many different ways to play this role, even though you tend to assume you’re just reading the lines as written.

the ambient feeling of being a human being; a baseline mood that everyone feels intensely every moment of their lives,

a momentary trance of emotional clarity

Sunrises

Your life is not just a quest, or an opportunity, or a story to tell; it’s also just an experience, to be lived for its own sake. It doesn’t have to mean anything other than what it is. A single moment can still stand on its own, as a morsel of existence.

LOUISE ERDRICH, The Painted Drum

Reading list?

This idea was the origin of the Elizabethan expression to look babies, which means “to stare lovingly into another’s eyes.”

a person who no longer exists.

Previous selves.

dolonia n. a state of unease prompted by people who seem to like you too much, which makes you wonder if they must have you confused with someone else—someone flawless, selfless, or easy to understand from a distance—feeling vaguely disappointed that they’re unwilling to spend the time it takes getting to know the real you.

Jay Tate, perhaps.

lilo n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if you’d seen each other last week—which is all the more remarkable given that certain other people can make every lull in conversation feel like an eternity.

watashiato n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

lookaback

There might be a big dramatic event going on that bends the course of our lives, except for certain people left out of the loop, who’ll always have to wonder.

All that is required is that we keep showing up, and never stop asking each other, “What are you thinking about?”

heartworm n. a relationship or friendship that you can’t get out of your head, which you thought had faded long ago but is still somehow alive and unfinished, like an abandoned campsite whose smoldering embers still have the power to start a forest fire.

par 0 (par zero), a theoretical hole on a golf course