We’re built to live simultaneously in love and loss, bitter and sweet.
― Susan Cain, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
I confess to being a connoisseur of all things bittersweet, melancholy, and poignant. I take great joy as I weep during Hallmark commercials or tear up when my grandson takes my hand. Recently, I watched all 2 hours and 13 minutes–for the fifth time, but who’s counting–of the 1994 film, Legends of the Fall, just to cry at the scene where Tristan (Brad Pitt) kneels, sobbing, at the grave of his brother. After both brothers enlist during WWI, Tristan vows to watch over and protect his younger brother but ultimately fails. Tristan watches helplessly as his brother calls for him, wandering blindly in a mustard gas fog before he’s finally cut down by machine gun fire and takes his last breaths draped over a barbed wire fence in No Man’s Land. The bittersweet quotient in this scene is wonderfully, painfully off the charts.
In Susan Cain’s 2022 book, Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole, she writes:
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.
Some may argue that there’s nothing new about the pairing of light and dark, bitter and sweet. Still, as Bilal Qureshi maintains in his New York Post article, “In a relentlessly positive culture, a defense of melancholy” (April 8, 2022), we should seriously consider this celebration of the “melancholic” disposition in a culture fixated on relentless positivity. For better or worse, we’ve collectively become positivity junkies, plastering encouraging posters on our walls and subscribing to apps that provide daily doses of optimisim and encouragement. Our playlists are often filled with upbeat melodies to which we can dance with abandon in our kitchens and sing at the top of our lungs in our cars. Our classrooms promote positivity mantras which our children happily learn. But Cain understands that in a world increasingly designed for extroverts and positivity-pushers, there are introverts and melancholics as well. Her 2013 book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, testifies to her desire that we also celebrate the quiet, contemplative, melancholy individuals around us.
While Cain discusses the bittersweet, she repeatedly refers to the paradox of tragedy. She explains that while we don’t actually seek out tragedy, we do like sad and beautiful things—the bitter together with the sweet. This paradox is revealed, she claims, in our penchant for elegiac poetry, seaside cities shrouded in fog, spires reaching through the clouds. In other words: We like art forms that express our longing for union, and for a more perfect and beautiful world. Consider the appeal of a good, melancholy ballad. Or consider the juxtapostion of a tender baby’s hand nestled inside a gnarled elderly person’s hand. Here, the sweet and the bitter occupy a geography of beauty and sorrow. Here, as Cain writes, we cry tears of joy—which tend to come during precious moments suffused with their imminent ending.
As a child, I loved to watch the television series, Lassie. My mother likes to remind me of how each week when the first notes of the theme song began to play, I would tear up in anticipation of what was to come. Even then, I loved how the bitter would befall Timmy or another character, and then how Lassie would return everyone to the sweet, guaranteeing a poignant resolution.
Last month when I spent three weeks in northeastern Pennsylvania on writing residency, I spent hours of each day rereading my dad’s books of poetry, going through his journals, leafing through file folders I’d found in his desk, and reviewing the small notebooks he carried as he walked the streets and alleys of Kearney, Nebraska. And each day, I felt as though I were dragging myself back through the days I’d spent with my dad before he died, as though I were reliving the beautiful agony of those last weeks. As I read, I cried and occasionally talked aloud to myself saying things like, “This is so good, Dad, so very, very good,” and “If I had just one more hour, maybe just a few more minutes, there are so many things I’d like to say and ask.” This is territory of the quintessential bittersweet. In the words of singer/songwriter John Mellencamp, it just hurts so good.
In describing our response to the bittersweet, Cain writes that [i]t’s an authentic and elevating response to the problem of being alive in a deeply flawed yet stubbornly beautiful world. I like this so much. The world we live in is deeply flawed and stubbornly beautiful, and our days, as the Arab proverb proclaims, are those of honey and onion. Ultimately, Cain proposes that we embrace the bittersweet more, that maybe we could see it—rather than enforced smiles and righteous outrage—as the bridge we need to connect with each other. She already had me at embrace. I’ve been embracing the bittersweet for as long as I can remember, and I couldn’t stop now if I tried. For the cattails have burst, and the milkweed pods are spilling their floss. And there is such beauty in their dying.
Cattails for my father The cattails have burst along Tewksbury Hollow Road, entrails slipping from their soft bellies like stuffing from a worn divan. In early autumn, the breeze carries them away— piece by piece, heart and soul. Beside them, thick stands of goldenrod thumb their noses, flaunting plumes the color of egg yolk. When I round the corner where a meadow stretches expectantly towards the treed hills beyond, I have the foolish urge to stuff their organs back into the brown bodies which have borne them for months. Because aren’t the days still warm enough, and haven’t the maples only just begun to turn? Because shouldn’t bodies be brawnier, matching spirit with good matter? Tomorrow, I fear this whole stretch of road may be a mortuary, the spent lives of cattails lining the ditches, the shade of hardwoods casting their pall. Tomorrow as I walk, I’ll think of you in your death bed; I’ll remember finding you so still as I put my hand upon yours which was already fingering a finer air.