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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired.
The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.
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]
the message of all these stories, the secret that our poets and philosophers have been trying to tell us for centuries, is that our longing is the great gateway to belonging.
