The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

kenopsia: the atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. dès vu: the awareness that this moment will become a memory. nodus tollens: the feeling that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. énouement: the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, seeing how things turn out, but unable to tell your past self. onism: the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. sonder: the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.

Words will never do us justice. But we have to try anyway. Luckily, the palette of language is infinitely expandable. If we wanted to, we could build a new linguistic framework to fill in the gaps, this time rooted in our common humanity, our shared vulnerability, and our complexity as individuals—a perspective that simply wasn’t there when most of our dictionaries were written.

Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn’t just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness—setting the focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once. When we speak of sadness these days, most of the time what we really mean is despair, which is literally defined as the absence of hope. But true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be.

These words were not necessarily intended to be used in conversation, but to exist for their own sake. To give some semblance of order to the wilderness inside your head, so you can settle it yourself on your own terms, without feeling too lost—safe in the knowledge that we’re all lost.

kairosclerosis n. the moment you look around and realize that you’re currently happy—consciously trying to savor the feeling—which prompts your intellect to identify it, pick it apart, and put it in context, where it will slowly dissolve until it’s little more than an aftertaste. Ancient Greek καιρός (kairos), a sublime or opportune moment + σκλήρωσις (sklḗrōsis), hardening. Pronounced “kahy-roh-skluh-roh-sis.”

occhiolism n. the awareness of how fundamentally limited your senses are—noticing how little of your field of vision is ever in focus, how few colors you’re able to see, how few sounds you’re able to hear, and how intrusively your brain fills in the blanks with its own cartoonish extrapolations—which makes you wish you could experience the whole of reality instead of only ever catching a tiny glimpse of it, to just once step back from the keyhole and finally open the door.

Is there any value left in taking yet another photo of the moon, or the Taj Mahal, or the Eiffel Tower? Is a photograph just a kind of souvenir to prove you’ve been someplace, like a prefabricated piece of furniture that you happened to have assembled yourself? It’s alright if we tell the same jokes we’ve all heard before. It’s alright if we keep remaking the same movies. It’s alright if we keep saying the same phrases to each other as if they had never been said before. Even when you look back to the earliest known work of art in existence, you’ll find a handprint stenciled on the wall of a cave—not just one, but hundreds overlapping, each indistinguishable from the other.

This too is not an original thought. As the poet once said, “The powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.” What else is there to say? When you get your cue, you say your line.

Maybe it shouldn’t matter if anyone ever finds it. If nobody’s there to know we once lived here on Earth. Maybe it should be like skipping a stone across the surface of a lake. It doesn’t matter where it ends up. All that matters is that we’re here on the shore—trying to have fun and pass the time, and see how far it goes.

ameneurosis n. the half-forlorn, half-escapist ache of a train whistle howling in the distance at night.

fitzcarraldo 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.

exulansis n. the tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it—whether through envy or pity or mere foreignness—which allows it to drift away from the rest of your story, until it feels out of place, almost mythical, wandering restlessly in the fog, no longer even looking for a place to land. Latin exulans, exile, wanderer, derived from the Latin name of the Wandering Albatross, diomedea exulans, who spend most of their life in flight, rarely landing, going hours without even flapping their wings. The albatross is a symbol of good luck, a curse, and a burden, and sometimes all three at once.

And even if she gets her wish, and wakes up back in Oz as if no time had passed—what then? How long before she’s clicking her heels on the sidewalks of Emerald City, trying to flag down a hot air balloon to take her back to the comfort and safety of home? If Oz is a dream that never leaves you, so is Kansas. Life is not a flat and barren outpost, and it’s not a bangarang wonderland either. Maybe they’re just two different ways of looking at some ambiguous middle place, where she actually lives.

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.

aubadoir n. the otherworldly atmosphere just before 5 a.m., when the bleary melodrama of an extremely late night becomes awkwardly conflated with the industrious fluorescence of a very early morning.

rückkehrunruhe n. the feeling of returning from an immersive trip only to notice it fading rapidly from your awareness, as if your brain had automatically assumed it was all just a dream and already went to work scrubbing it from your memory.

But in a couple hundred years, this world will turn over to a completely different cast of characters. They won’t look back and wonder who won the battles or when. Instead, they’ll try to imagine how we lived day to day, gathering precious artifacts of the world as it once was, in all its heartbreaking little details. They’ll look for the doodles left behind in the margins of our textbooks, and the dandelions pressed in the pages. They’ll try to imagine how our clothes felt on our bodies, and what we ate for lunch on a typical day, and what it might’ve cost.

justing n. the habit of telling yourself that just one tweak could solve all of your problems—if only you had the right haircut, if only you found the right group of friends, if only you made a little more money, if only he noticed you, if only she loved you back, if only you could find the time, if only you were confident—which leaves you feeling perpetually on the cusp of a better life, hanging around the top of the slide waiting for one little push.