Power Of The Bittersweet

In this audio excerpt from her book, author Susan Cain shows the power of the "bittersweet" -- the outlook that values the experiences of loss and pain, which can lead to growth and beauty. Understanding bittersweetness can change the way we work, the way we create and the way we love.

Transcript

Once,

When I was a 22-year-old law student,

Some friends picked me up in my dorm on the way to class.

I had been happily listening to bittersweet music in a minor key.

Not the albinoni,

Which I hadn't heard back then.

More likely,

A song by my all-time favorite musician,

Leonard Cohen,

Aka the poet laureate of pessimism.

It's hard to put into words what I experience when I hear this kind of music.

It's technically sad,

But what I feel really is love.

A great title outpouring of it.

A deep kinship with all the other souls in the world who know the sorrow the music strains to express.

Awe at the musician's ability to transform pain into beauty.

If I'm alone when I'm listening,

I often make a spontaneous prayer gesture,

Hands to face,

Palm to palm,

Even though I'm deeply agnostic and don't formally pray.

But the music makes my heart open,

Literally the sensation of expanding chest muscles.

It even makes it seem okay that everyone I love,

Including me,

Is going to die one day.

This equanimity about death lasts maybe three minutes,

But each time it happens,

It changes me slightly.

If you define transcendence as a moment in which your self fades away and you feel connected to the all,

These musically bittersweet moments are the closest I have come to experiencing it.

But it's happened over and over again.

And I could never understand why.

Meanwhile,

My friends were amused by the incongruity of mournful songs blasting from a dorm room stereo.

One of them asked why I was listening to funeral tunes.

I laughed and we went to class.

End of story.

Except that I thought about his comment literally for the next 25 years.

Why did I find yearning music so strangely uplifting?

And what in our culture made this a fitting subject for a joke?

Why,

Even as I write this,

Do I feel the need to reassure you that I love dance music too?

I really do.

At first,

These were just interesting questions.

But as I searched for answers,

I realized that they were the questions,

The big ones,

And that contemporary culture has trained us to our great impoverishment not to ask them.

Two thousand years ago,

Aristotle wondered why the great poets,

Philosophers,

Artists,

And politicians often have melancholic personalities.

His question was based on the ancient belief that the human body contains four humors,

Or liquid substances,

Each corresponding to a different temperament.

Melancholic for sad,

Sanguine for happy,

Choleric for aggressive,

And phlegmatic for calm.

The relative amounts of these liquids were thought to shape our characters.

Hippocrates,

The famed Greek physician,

Believed that the ideal person enjoyed a harmonious balance of the four,

But many of us tend in one direction or another.

This book is about the melancholic direction,

Which I call the bittersweet.

A tendency to states of longing,

Poignancy,

And sorrow,

An acute awareness of passing time,

And a curiously piercing joy at 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.

Days of honey,

Days of onion,

As an Arabic proverb puts it.

The tragedy of life is linked inescapably with its splendor.

You could tear civilization down and rebuild it from scratch,

And the same dualities would rise again.

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.

If you see yourself as a bittersweet type,

It's hard to discuss Aristotle's question about the melancholia of the greats without sounding self-congratulatory.

But the fact is that his observation has resonated across the millennia.

In the 15th century,

The philosopher Marsilio Ficino proposed that Saturn,

The Roman god associated with melancholy,

Has relinquished the ordinary life to Jupiter,

But he claims for himself a life sequestered and divine.

The 16th century artist Albrecht Dürer famously depicted melancholy as a downcast angel surrounded by symbols of creativity,

Knowledge,

And yearning,

A polyhedron,

An hourglass,

A ladder ascending to the sky.

The 19th century poet Charles Baudelaire could scarcely conceive of a type of beauty,

He said,

In which there is no melancholy.

This romantic vision of melancholia has waxed and waned over time.

Most recently,

It's waned.

In an influential 1918 essay,

Sigmund Freud dismissed melancholia's narcissism,

And ever since,

It's disappeared into the maw of psychopathology.

Mainstream psychology sees it as synonymous with clinical depression.

But Aristotle's question never went away.

It can't.

There's some mysterious property in melancholy,

Something essential.

Plato had it,

And so did Jalal al-Din Rumi,

So did Charles Darwin,

Abraham Lincoln,

Maya Angelou,

Nina Simone,

Leonard Cohen.

But what exactly did they have?

I've spent years researching this question,

Following a centuries-old trail laid by artists,

Writers,

Contemplatives,

And wisdom traditions from all over the world.

This path also led me to the work of contemporary psychologists,

Scientists,

And even management researchers who have discovered some of the unique strengths of melancholic business leaders and creatives,

And the best ways to tap them.

And I've concluded that bittersweetness is not,

As we tend to think,

Just a momentary feeling or event.

It's also a quiet force,

A way of being,

A storied tradition,

As dramatically overlooked as it is brimming with human potential.

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.

This idea of transforming pain into creativity,

Transcendence,

And love,

Is the heart of this book.

Reviews

Thank you much! I so much relate to that which you share here. For 78 years I have been described as moody, quiet, sometimes depressive, and sometimes too serious or analytical and temperamental, but certainly with that I have also been described as amazingly creative, sometimes mischievous or playful, often compassionate and generous and I love music and movies that bring me to tears. I certainly contemplate death, especially as I get older now, and it doesn’t trouble me, even as I walk that path with others. Actually, over the years, I’ve learned to appreciate and value all of those parts of me. I will certainly look into your book. 🙏

Thank you for so eloquently putting into words what I've always thought and felt.

Interesting introduction to the author's newest book. I am interested in the book and was glad to find this here. It's a well-written explanation of a deep but relatively obscure topic, melancoly in the arts and how we interface with it.

Wow! Truly inspiring and I am looking forward to reading the book.

Very inspirational! Thank you, Susan.

👏🏻

Thank you for sharing part of your book 😀

Great listen, thank you for this insight on an often misunderstood word! I journaled about it. I really loved the very soothing and clear narration too. Adding the book to my list!

Love melancholia as one part of the spectrum, of the psyche. Thank you Susan❤️

Absolutely transformative! Just wow! Gotta get that book 🙏🦋

A powerful message that the world needs!

Intriguing. There is a poignancy about the passing of time, the awareness of dark and light in this world. I also think we humans wrestle with doubt and faith. To transcend and find equanimity with all that we cannot change or control seems to be the beginning of true wisdom. I was very prone to depression until I really started giving back to this world, being of service. I found a new perspective in suffering, as it deepened my heart, and my heart’s resilience. My faith that there is something greater, (whom I choose to call God) allows me to stay open for what lies ahead, instead of shutting down with bitterness.

Loved that reading 💙

Woww

Sounds like a good read !!

She so much speaks to me!!!

Loved this. Thankyou.

Reading the book now and loving it. Loved this nugget from the book 🙏🏼💕

Wonderful