Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

by Susan Cain

The ancient Greeks called it pothos, which Plato defined as a yearning desire for something wonderful that we can’t have. Pothos was our thirst for everything good and beautiful. Humans were lowly beings imprisoned in matter, inspired by pothos to reach for a higher reality. The concept was associated with both love and death; in Greek myth, Pothos (Longing) was the brother of Himeros (Desire) and the son of Eros (Love). But because pothos had that quality of aching for the unattainable, the word was also used to describe the flowers placed on Grecian tombs. The state of longing strikes contemporary ears as passive, gloomy, and helpless, but pothos was understood to be an activating force. The young Alexander the Great described himself as “seized by pothos” as he sat on a riverbank and gazed into the distance; it was pothos that set Homer’s Odyssey in motion, with the shipwrecked Odysseus longing for home.