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You ask me am I crazy for playing the cello in a war zone, he says. Why don’t you ask THEM if they’re crazy for shelling Sarajevo?
We’re not combatants, call the violinists; we’re not victims, either, add the violas. We’re just humans, sing the cellos, just humans: flawed and beautiful and aching for love.
“bittersweet”: a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world.
potential. It’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world.
Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way the musicians do, or healing, or innovation, or anything else that nourishes the soul. If we don’t transform our sorrows and longings, we can end up inflicting them on others via abuse, domination, neglect. But if we realize that all humans know—or will know—loss and suffering, we can turn toward each other.[*2] This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.
But longing is momentum in disguise: It’s active, not passive; touched with the creative, the tender, and the divine. We long for something, or someone. We reach for it, move toward it.
what orients a person to the bittersweet is a heightened awareness of finality.
The real reason for his emotions—for all our emotions—is to connect us. And Sadness, of all the emotions, was the ultimate bonding agent.
The word compassion literally means “to suffer together,”
We also know that depressed (and formerly depressed) people are more likely to see the world from others’ points of view and to experience compassion; conversely, high-empathy people are more likely than others to enjoy sad music.
“We are impelled to relieve the sufferings of another,” wrote Darwin, “in order that our own painful feelings may at the same time be relieved.”
Both Darwinism and Buddhism view compassion as the greatest virtue, and the mother-infant bond as the heart of sympathy.
Neuroticism does have upsides. Despite their stressed immune systems, neurotics may live longer because they’re vigilant types who take good care of their health. They’re strivers, driven by fear of failure to succeed, and by self-criticism to improve. They’re good scholars because they turn concepts over in their minds and consider them at great length, from every angle.
well-being actually involves a subtle, dialectical interplay between positive and negative phenomena.”
a bittersweet personality style Maslow called “transcenders”: people who “are less ‘happy’ than the [conventionally] healthy ones. They can be more ecstatic, more rapturous, and experience greater heights of ‘happiness,’ but they are as prone—or maybe more prone—to a kind of cosmic sadness.”
“I’m not sure I’ll get a sense of place and community in this life.”
Should we learn to let go of the dream of fairy-tale love, and to fully embrace the imperfect loves we know?
our longing for “perfect” love is normal and desirable; that the wish to merge with a beloved of the soul is the deepest desire of the human heart; that longing is the road to belonging.
Longing itself is a creative and spiritual state.
We think: ‘I’m a still circle of perfection in a sea of madness.’
“We need to accept that there is no partner who would understand the whole of us, who will share all of our tastes in large and small areas. Ultimately, it is always a percentage of compatibility we will only ever achieve. Let’s go back to Plato and kill, once and for all, as a group, his charming, but insane, love-destroying piece of naivety. WE HAVE NO SOUL MATE.”
yearning flourishes in the realm of romantic love—but it doesn’t derive from it. Rather, the yearning comes first, and exists on its own; romantic love is just one expression of it.
mark. But what is it, exactly, that makes bittersweet music like “Moonlight Sonata” so exalting? How can the same stimulus speak simultaneously of joy and sorrow, love and loss—and why are we so keen to listen?
they associate sad songs with profound beauty, deep connection, transcendence, nostalgia, and common humanity—the so-called sublime emotions.
Spain uses its “saddest melodies and most melancholy texts to tinge her children’s first slumber.”
(The Japanese, who love sakura flowers most of all, attribute this preference to mono no aware, which means a desired state of gentle sorrow brought about by “the pathos of things” and “a sensitivity to impermanence”).
all the variables influencing whether a person is likely to be moved by sad music, the strongest is empathy.
We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. When we feel strangely thrilled by the sorrow of “Moonlight Sonata,” it’s the yearning for love that we’re experiencing—fragile, fleeting, evanescent, precious, transcendent love.
The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine.
The ancient Greeks called it pothos, which Plato defined as a yearning desire for something wonderful that we can’t have.
When you talk about longing, it’s so huge, I don’t know where it stops. Home isn’t a place. Home is where that longing is, and you don’t feel good until you’re there. In the end, it’s one big yearning. In Sufism, they call it the pain. In Sufism, they call it the cure.”
Conventional religious leaders sometimes dismiss mystics as woolly-headed or heretical or both—perhaps fearing that anyone who bypasses religious institutions and heads straight to God could put them out of business.
“Like everything that is created, love has a dual nature, positive and negative, masculine and feminine. The masculine side of love is ‘I love you.’ Love’s feminine quality is ‘I am waiting for you; I am longing for you.’
These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
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.
Whatever pain you can’t get rid of, make it your creative offering—or find someone who makes it for you. And if you do find yourself drawn to such a person, ask yourself why they call to you. What are they expressing on your behalf—and where do they have the power to take you?
the broken Hallelujah, the crack in everything. The whole notion that defeat and imperfection and brokenness was the fabric of the experience. Then, instead of just having a plaintive assertion, the real generosity was to write about it in a way that you hadn’t considered, with generosity, with voluptuousness, with inventiveness, and then he could, on top of it, set it to a melody.
that such experiences are associated with higher self-esteem, pro-social behavior, a greater sense of meaning, lower rates of depression, greater life satisfaction and well-being, a decreased fear of death, and overall psychological health.
“sad” music, like Leonard Cohen’s, isn’t really sad at all: why it’s rooted in brokenness, but points at transcendence.
Endings will give way to beginnings just as much as beginnings give way to endings.
many people respond to loss by healing in others the wounds that they themselves have suffered.
“Everything that you love, you will eventually lose. But in the end, love will return in a different form.”
