Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole

A review in quotes from the book...

“This book is about the melancholic direction, which I call ‘bittersweet': a tendency to states of longing, poignancy, and sorrow; an acute awareness of passing time; and a curiously piercing joy and the beauty of the world. The bittersweet is also about the recognition that light and dark, birth and death—bitter and sweet—are forever paired...Yet to fully inhabit these dualities—the dark as well as the light—is, paradoxically, the only way to transcend them. And transcending them is the ultimate point. The bittersweet is about the desire for communion, the wish to go home.” (p. xxiii)

“Most of all, bittersweetness shows us how to respond to pain: by acknowledging it, and attempting to turn it into art, the way 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. This idea—of transforming pain into creativity, transcendence, and love—is the heart of this book.” (p. xxv)

“...creativity has the power to look pain in the eye, and to decide to turn it into something better.” (p. 61)

“We're taught to think of our psychic and physical wounds as the irregularities of our lives, deviations from what should have been; sometimes, as sources of stigma. But our stories of loss and separation are also the baseline state, right alongside our stories of landing our dream job, falling in love, giving birth to our miraculous children. And the very highest states—of awe and joy, wonder and love, meaning and creativity—emerge from this bittersweet nature of reality. We experience them not because life is perfect—but because it's not.” (pp. 92-93)

Okay, I think that's enough to give you the flavor (if you will) of this lovely, lovely book.