The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

by John Koenig

kerisl n. the sorrow of imagining the wealth of knowledge forever lost to history—knowing we’ll never hear the language of the Etruscans, the battle cry of the Sea Peoples, or the burial chants of the Neanderthals; that we’ll never read any more than a fragment of the works of Blake, Sappho, Aristotle, or Jesus; or enjoy the untold treasures of so many burned libraries and forgotten oral traditions and unrecorded songs—any of which might have made up the cornerstone of the canon, that we’d all be able to quote by heart and couldn’t imagine living without. A contraction of Kergeulen Islands. Roughly equidistant between Australia, Antarctica, and Madagascar, they are the only visible remnant of the Kergeulen microcontinent, which was submerged some twenty million years ago. Three times the size of Japan, it was once covered in dense conifer forests, with peaks reaching 2,000 meters above sea level, populated with strange and nameless fauna that must have called it home, before all traces were lost beneath the waves. Pronounced “kair-ahyl.”