Shortly after releasing my song Of Joy and Sorrow, I received news of a new book and podcast that seem to be very much in the same spirit. It’s called Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. According to the author, Susan Cain:
There is a deep, bittersweet tradition that has existed for centuries all across the world—you see it in all the different wisdom traditions—that tells us that there is this place where joy and sorrow meet. That is the truth of being human.
The similarity with Kahlil Gibran’s words on joy and sorrow (written in 1923) is striking. Here are some of the lines I set to music:
The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain. … When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
I have to confess I haven’t read/listened to Susan Cain’s book/podcast, but according to the promotional material I received, she also explores:
- How an experience of the bittersweet can lead to profound transcendence
- The creative stimulation we can access in the gap between what is and what we wish were
- Stepping out of the paradigm of winning at all costs
- The connection between high sensitivity and an attunement to the bittersweet
- Our human longing for a more perfect and beautiful world
- The link between sorrow and kindness
- How confronting our sorrows presents a fork in the road
- The archetype of the wounded healer
- Moving on versus moving forward
- Healing our inherited traumas
- Leaning into the question, “What am I longing for?”
(For more information, please contact Sounds True. Please note that I don’t work for them and this blog is not intended to promote Ms Cain or them but just to bring to your attention this coincidence of ideas and a potentially interesting book. If you read it and it’s good please let me know!)
As joy and sorrow seem on the face of it to be incompatible polar opposites, and as I’m about to release a new version of Of Joy and Sorrow, it seems timely to have another look at what Gibran says about the relationship between those two intense emotional states. Here is the video of Of Joy and Sorrow (the original version with orchestra), with Kahlil Gibran’s full text as subtitles:
Susan Cain’s emphasis on the bittersweet also makes me think of nostalgia, that ambiguous happy/sad feeling you get when you reflect on the good things you no longer have – and what she says above seems to be very much in the spirit of my instrumental piece Nostalgia. Here is what I wrote in my notes to that piece:
“Nostalgia, n. a longing for experiences, things, or acquaintanceships belonging to the past” (Random House Dictionary). Nostalgia can also be a longing for experiences or things belonging to the imagined past, things that in reality have never existed. Nostalgia can be gentle, almost comforting, or it can be a deeper “perturbation of the soul”, a yearning for something that was never really in your possession, homesickness for a place you have never lived in.
This is the video of Nostalgia:
I also see a relationship between nostalgia and beauty, and between beauty, joy, sorrow and longing, and in my notes to Nostalgia I added “beneath beauty there is something deeper, something we long for, though we may not have a name for it”. Kahlil Gibran seems to have had a similar view and also had profound things to say about beauty. I set his words on that subject in my song Of Beauty, which you can find on my YouTube channel if you would like to reflect further on this.
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