Obscure Sorrows, Enigmatic Joy

John Koenig’s wonderful 2021 bestseller, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, is a dazzling compendium of new words and definitions designed to express emotions common to the human experience that we normally lack the language to express.

Its mission, as he explains in his introduction, “is to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being — all the aches, demons, vibes, joys, and urges that are humming in the background of everyday life.”

Koenig succeeds brilliantly with whimsical etymologies drawn from languages around the world and his accompanying collages and lyrical essays. Take, for example, his recasting of the word “sonder,” drawn from the French word meaning “to plumb the depths.”

Sonder: n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own — populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness — an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know exist, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Some other examples I’ve chosen at random:

the whipcraft delusion: n. the phenomenon in which you catch your reflection in the mirror and get the sense that you’re peering into the eyes of a stranger, as if you’re looking at a police sketch of your own face aged forward twenty years, which would imply that the real you is out there somewhere, wandering the streets of your old neighbourhood, still at large.

funkenzwangsvorstellung: n. the primal sense of watching a campfire in the dark.

zielschmerz: n. the dread of finally pursuing a lifelong dream, which requires you to put your true abilities out there to be tested on the open savannah, no longer protected inside the terrarium of hopes and delusions that you started up in kindergarten and kept sealed as long as you could.

harmonoia: n. an itchy sense of dread when life feels just a hint too peaceful — when everyone seems to get along suspiciously well, with an eerie stillness that makes you want to brace for the inevitable collapse, or burn it down yourself.

kenopsia: n. the atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.

I particularly like the following one, a reversal of the drop kick in football that you almost never see any more:

the kick drop: n. the moment you wake up from an immersive dream and have to abruptly recalibrate to the real world — unquitting your job, falling right back out of love, reburying your lost loved ones.

There are dozens of such little gems. But since I’ve been encountering this a lot lately, the one that really spoke to me was a combination of “heart” and “spur” (as in one of those little spikes used to kickstart horses at racetracks):

heartspur: n. an unexpected surge of emotion in response to a seemingly innocuous trigger — the distinctive squeal of a rusty fence, a key change in a pop song, the hint of a certain perfume — which feels all the more intense because you can’t quite pin it down.

This almost never happened when I was younger but occurs more and more often the closer I get to the point where the battery is bound to age out on my own little prison searchlight of consciousness. And if you’re of a certain age, I’m betting I’m not alone in the following experience:

When watching a touching or a schmaltzy bit in a movie (doesn’t have to be a particularly good one) or listening to a song on the radio (ditto) or even recounting a story or incident in which I might not even have played a role, a sudden heartspur will unaccountably bring tears to my eyes and a lump to my throat, forcing me to stop speaking and catch my breath before continuing.

For a microsecond of delirious madness, I’m decked out in Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Neil Young’s silver spaceships are flying in the yellow haze of the sun and I am gobsmacked by the joyous cosmology of the shapes that become colours and the colours that become vibrations and the vibrations that become sounds and the sounds that become shapes — by the whole nacreous shebang of Being, really, and an evanescent appreciation of the honour of merely existing against a backdrop of unfathomable improbability.

Then I’m hauled brutally back to my timid, cautious, no-account life — the foul, stinking lump of myself — as my roots (like Virginia Woolf’s, whom I’m quoting here) go down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs as I … suddenly realize it’s time to cut back on the psyllium tablets and digestive cannabis gummies.

Mais sérieusement. Just like you and Bruce Cockburn, sometimes I’m dazzled by the beauty of it all ... then devastated by the knowledge that the end draws nigh and the sky will fall. I see a little silhouetto of a man. Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango? Thunderbolt and lightning, very very frightening.

Me.

We’re supposed to feel things more deeply when we’re young and become more reserved and less emotional when we get older, but I’m finding this hard to do with the inescapable awareness that day after day, the whole place slippin’ away. (Also, more people come to L.A., but that’s really not germane to the current disquisition.)

Suffering a heartspur can be embarrassing, but it’s also a reminder of how much I’m gonna miss this place. And if anyone is motivated to play Les Crane’s spoken-word “Desiderata” track or Louis Armstrong’s recording of “What a Wonderful World” at this point, I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go placidly amid the noise and haste amid skies of blue and clouds of white before throwing up on your shoe.

In her poignant autobiography, La Force des choses, French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir wrote heartspurringly about how the sadness of old age arises partly from the knowledge that the entire internal cosmos we carry within us — every private recollection, nuance and connection to others — is soon to dissolve in the waters of oblivion:

I think with sadness of all the books I’ve read, all the places I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve amassed and that will be no more. All the music, all the paintings, all the culture, so many places: and suddenly nothing.

So maybe it’s not surprising, then, that the heartspur becomes a more frequent happening as we get older. And perhaps this is what the heartspur knows before we do, viz., that the thing itself is not the thing we are crying about.

The song is not the song. The movie is not the movie. The rusty gate is not the gate. We hear three notes and suddenly we are somewhere else, although “somewhere else” is not quite the right phrase, because the place is still here. The room is still here. The television is still playing. Someone is still talking in the kitchen. The dog is still snoring.

And yet.

There are moments when the present seems to acquire a second exposure. The person sitting in the chair is sitting in the chair, but also watching himself sit there ten years ago, or twenty, or perhaps ten years from now. The ordinary object becomes charged with its future absence. The tea-cup on the table is suddenly the tea-cup that will one day no longer be on the table.

The familiar voice is already a voice you will remember having heard. Or read. W.H. Auden’s, for example:

The glacier knocks in the cupboard,

 The desert sighs in the bed,

And the crack in the tea-cup opens

A lane to the land of the dead.

This strikes me as one of the peculiar cruelties of getting older: the future begins to enter the room disguised as memory.

When you are young, you imagine the future as an accumulation. More books. More cities. More mornings. More people arriving at the door. You think of time as something that will furnish the rooms of your life, adding chairs, paintings, grandchildren, mistakes, recoveries. Even losses seem provisional. There will be other friendships. Other houses. Other summers.

At some point, though, without any official announcement, the arithmetic changes. The question is no longer what will be added but what will remain.

I notice this most often in places where nothing is supposed to happen. A supermarket late in the afternoon. A parking lot after rain. The sound of my wife upstairs removing clothing from the dryer. A particular quality of light on the wall in September.

Nothing.

And then everything.

There is a reason that the older we get the more susceptible we seem to be to ordinary beauty. It is not that the world has become more beautiful. The world has always been capable of this particular trick. It is that we have become increasingly aware of the conditions under which beauty disappears. And this might be our only claim to wisdom.

The light comes through the window. The light moves. The light is gone. Almost unbearably simple, which may be why we spend so much of our lives trying not to notice it.

We make plans. We buy things. We answer messages. We complain about traffic. We worry about money. We worry about our children. We worry about our parents. We worry about whether we said the wrong thing at dinner. We acquire passwords and receipts and opinions. We become experts in the management of the next twenty-four hours.

And underneath all this administrative activity is the enormous fact that none of it can be kept.

Maybe this is why certain memories become more vivid with age while others dissolve. The mind is not an archive arranged according to importance. It is stranger than that. It saves a smell. A hand on a doorknob. The sound of a particular laugh coming from another room. The cerulean hue of a shirt someone wore once and never again.

It does not save the meeting where the decision was made. It saves the way the sunlight fell across the conference-room table.

I have sometimes wondered whether this is what we mean when we say we miss someone.

Not that we want the person returned exactly as they were, which is impossible even in imagination, but that we want the world in which that person existed to become available again. We want the old configuration of things. The apartment with the particular lamp. The telephone on the particular table. The voice from the hallway. The version of ourselves who had not yet learned — or at least wasn’t yet troubled by the fact, because it seemed impossibly far in the future — that this would all disappear.

But that person is gone too. And this is the deepest sorrow of memory: it preserves evidence without restoring context.

You can remember being loved without being able to return to the particular self who was capable of receiving that love. You can remember happiness without remembering how ordinary it felt at the time. You can remember a room long after you have forgotten what you were doing in it. And while you were taking that trip down memory lane, you forgot to pick up milk on the way home as you promised you would.

This is why the heartspur can arrive through such apparently trivial openings. It does not require tragedy. Tragedy announces itself. The heartspur prefers camouflage. A melody. A smell. The sound of ice being dropped into a glass. Someone saying a phrase in precisely the way your father used to say it. A girl who laughs like the sister who died half a century ago. The first cool evening of fall.

And suddenly the entire vanished architecture of a life seems to flicker behind the present. Not return. Flicker. Because the mature form of nostalgia is not the wish to go back. It is the recognition that there is nowhere to go back to. The old house has been sold. The street has been widened. The neighbours have moved away. The restaurant has become a bank. The person in the photograph has become someone you can identify only because you once knew him.

Even the body that remembers is changing.

This, too, is part of the sadness de Beauvoir was describing: not simply that we die, but that the private world dies with us. Each of us is carrying around a museum for which we alone possess the catalogue. And that museum is closing.

This sounds bleak when put that way. Sometimes it is bleak. But there is another possibility, one I have been arriving at reluctantly, because it feels suspiciously like consolation.

Perhaps the point is not to save the museum. Perhaps the point was always to walk through it. To notice what is there. To stand in front of the ordinary things long enough for them to become extraordinary. To understand that the fact of impermanence does not diminish an experience. It is the condition that makes the experience an experience at all.

The song ends. The movie ends. The summer ends. Someone leaves the room. The light changes. And for a few seconds we understand, without having to be told, what we had been taking for granted all along.

That this was it. No. That this is it, as Alan Watts would counsel. That we should be here now, in the present moment, as Ram Dass implored. But no eminent philosopher or theologian ever set the table better than the Bugs Bunny theme: Overture, curtains, lights!

Not for the grand finale. Not the final scene accompanied by swelling strings. Just this particular afternoon, this particular song, this particular person sitting beside us.

This.

Which was never going to last. Which we knew all along. Which is perhaps why, every once in a while, the heart gives that little involuntary kick. Not because something is wrong. But because something is precious. And because, somewhere beneath all our elaborate defences, we should know the difference after all this time. Otherwise, what are we even doing here?

No more rehearsing and nursing a part.