S.C.: When I gave my TED Talk on bittersweetness in the summer of 2019, it was fascinating how much the very act of talking about sorrow, longing and bittersweetness was seen as being a statement of depression, as opposed to a cleareyed view of what life is. If you had published this book before the pandemic, do you think there would be a different level of reception? They’re all manifestations of the same fundamental state of humanity. I don’t believe we should be making a distinction between the divine and creativity and compassion and all these things. That’s what carries you to the divine, to creativity. In the “Odyssey,” Odysseus was seized by homesickness and that was what propelled him on his journey. S.C.: In our culture, you say the word “longing” and you might think “mired in longing” or “wallowing in longing,” but that’s not how it has been understood historically. Tell us a little about the importance of “longing,” how it’s been misunderstood in modern times and within the context of a culture driven by “the tyranny of optimism?” What we’re really seeing is an expression of that more perfect and beautiful world that we feel like we come from and that we need to return to. That’s a spiritual impulse that we’re having. Sometimes that’s expressed in explicitly religious terms, like the longing for Mecca or for Zion, or for Eden, or like the way the Sufis put it, which is my favorite, “the longing for the beloved of the soul.”īut it’s also in those moments when we see a gorgeous waterfall or a painting that’s so beautiful that it makes us cry. C.: We would do better to understand that the most fundamental aspect of being human is the longing to live in a more perfect and beautiful world than the one that we live in now. What would you like people to understand about being open to or celebrating feelings like sadness and longing? Cain, who is also the author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking,” discussed the importance of sorrow and more in the edited interview below. Cain indicates, is also the site of the very sadness-joy-survival continuum that makes us human. Cain writes, that the vagus nerve - the constellation of nerves that connects the brain stem to the throat and the abdomen and is responsible for digestion, breathing and heart rate - is also associated with compassion in the face of sadness, our instinct to protect our young and desire to experience pleasure.įittingly, the oldest, most instinctive part of our nervous system, which evolved so that we had the necessary empathy to respond to our underdeveloped newborns, Ms. And this “happiness of melancholy” has a physiological signature and explanation. “The sadness from which compassion springs is a pro-social emotion, an agent of connection and love,” she writes. The book aims to explain that irrepressible lump in our throat spurred by seeing an image of our high school grad as a grinning toddler. “Bittersweet,” which is part memoir and partly a look at neuroscience, psychology, spirituality, religion, epigenetics, music, poetry and art, makes a case for the underappreciated “curiously piercing joy at the beauty of the world” within a culture of relentless optimism. At the heart of her exploration is the naming and reframing of her titular paradox: that there is no bitter without sweet. Cain, who believes that we experience our deepest states of love, happiness, awe and creativity precisely because life is imperfect, not in spite of that fact. “Bittersweetness is the hidden source of our moonshots, masterpieces and love stories,” writes Ms. Have you ever wondered why we love sad songs, or get choked up at a “Thank you, Mom” Olympics commercial? Questions like these were the impetus for Susan Cain’s new book, “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.”
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