Intro. (Recording date: October 8, 2024.)
Russ Roberts: Today is October 8th, 2024 and my guest is author Susan Cain. Her first book was Quiet. Her most recent book and the subject of today’s conversation is Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole. Susan, welcome to EconTalk.
Susan Cain: Thank you so much, Russ. It’s great to be here with you.
Russ Roberts: Tell us about the title of the book. Of course, it’s the subject of the book. What does bittersweet mean to you?
Susan Cain: Bittersweet is about the fact that we live constantly in a state that is both joy and sorrow. And, to be in a bittersweet state is to be kind of acutely aware of this–to be acutely aware of the impermanence of the world, and somehow amidst all of that for that knowledge to give us a piercing sense of joy and beauty along with everything else. So, it’s this curious state of being that to be aware of the difficulties of life along with the joys of life can somehow be uplifting and elevating as opposed to its opposite, which is what people expect it to be.
Russ Roberts: Your opening of the book is a very incredibly beautiful essay on just this phenomenon. And, it’s a little tricky to pin down. And, in fact, you rely on music and you rely on poetry–two things that I think of as capturing the human experience that’s hard to put into words. Talk about how music gave you an entry and really started this book going.
Susan Cain: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny that you use the word ‘rely’ because I don’t think of myself as having relied on music so much to illustrate this incredibly ineffable topic. It’s rather that music is what made the topic relevant in the first place. Because I’ve been having this experience all my life, and I know from the reaction to the book that many other people do, too. Of listening to music and having been drawn in particular to kind of minor key, longing, searching, yearning music and having the experience of finding this music incredibly–again, to use those words–elevating and uplifting; and this being a real mystery to me.
I talk in the book about an experience I had when I was a young 20-something in law school, and some friends came to pick me up in my dorm room to go to class together, and they found me listening to something like Leonard Cohen–who is my ultimate rabbi and patron saint–and blasting that music. And, my friends thought that was hilarious–of why it was that they found me blasting sad music. They said, ‘Why are you here listening to funeral tunes?’
And, I scratched my head over that question literally for the 25 years thereafter. I was trying to figure out, number one, why is it that there was something vaguely embarrassing about listening to that kind of music? And second, why–but this was the real question–why is it that the music to me spoke of love and elevation and not of the sorrow that is its manifest content? That there’s a deeper content underneath the sorrow, and that that’s really what we’re tuning in to when we have those songs on our playlist.
And, I talk in the book about how there’s research showing that we listen to the sad songs on our playlist–I forget the numbers now–but something like we listen to the happy songs 175 times and the sad songs something like 700 times. So, there’s something about this music that really makes us tune in.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. Leonard Cohen is a particularly dark minstrel. The last song he wrote, as you mention, before he died, is he wants it darker. And, the ‘he,’ in that is, if I remember correctly, is God. It’s a very disturbing song. And, when I was reading your book in that section, and inevitably–and I encourage listeners to comment and add their own favorites–but I thought about Bach and the “Partitas” which are the most melancholy, for cello–unbearably sad. And yet I love listening to them, and they can make you cry. And, it raises the question you raise. Why would you want to listen to something that would make you cry? Wouldn’t you want to listen to something that would make you dance and be joyous? And of course, we do sometimes.
The other thing I was struck by is thinking about as the Naomi Shemer song, “Al kol eleh (Over all these, a.k.a. The Bitter and the Sweet)” It’s a Hebrew song. It’s really, in my mind, the real Israeli national anthem. And, its opening lines are: “Over the honey and the sting, and the bitter and the sweet.” And, it’s a prayer. It asks the good Lord to watch over these things. And, it raises your question: Well, why would you want to watch over the honey and the sting? Preserve the honey, sure, but why also the sting?
And, your book really captures bittersweet. The mixture of those two is, as you describe it, poignant; and it gets us into an emotional state that is related to longing and yearning and transcendence. What does transcendence have to do with it for you?
Susan Cain: Well, you mention the tears. The ultimate conclusion that I came to of why it is that we listen to this music, it’s really a spiritual conclusion. What’s happening is we, all of us–all human beings–enter this world, we enter in tears, right? And, we enter in a kind of state of homesickness. A feeling that we have been taken away from the place we were meant to be. You can see that encoded into all of our religions, right? There’s the longing for Zion, and the longing for the beloved, and the longing for God that all the different religions talk about.
And, there’s this term that I came across–I think I actually used it as the epigraph in the book–the term of ‘holy tears.’ And so, what’s happening is when we see something that’s incredibly beautiful–it could be listening to beautiful music; it could be seeing a beautiful gymnastics routine. It could be a beautiful soccer game. It could be anything. You see something that’s a manifestation of beauty; and sometimes we have that experience of it making us cry. It’s so beautiful that it brings tears to your eyes. And you wonder: Well, why am I crying at that? It’s not really–a weeping; it’s a pinprick of tears. And, why do we have them?
And I think the answer is that at that moment, we are beholding something so beautiful that it reminds us–it’s a form of transcendence. It reminds us of this perfect and beautiful state of union, this perfect and beautiful world that we are all longing for. And, it also reminds us of the gap between that world and the world in which we live.
So, it’s like when you see that beautiful soccer game, it’s actually as if you’re beholding Eden right over there. You can see it, you can smell the sense of it, but you can’t quite enter.
And, there’s something about that gap that is incredibly profound for us. And, that’s the moment of transcendence–in the sense of transcending everyday earthly concerns, transcending our own self. You’re transcending and entering that state of perfection and beauty if only for a moment.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I think it’s really lovely. I certainly feel it in music. I feel it with a particular kind of sports moment. Just to pick up one simple example that a few of our listeners will know–not too many. When LeBron James chased down–I think he was with the Cleveland Cavaliers–he chased down somebody full court and blocked what was a certain basket that seemed inevitable. It was perfect, what he did. He didn’t foul him. It didn’t touch him. It was a magnificent transcending of the limitations of his humanness–and certainly mine because I can’t fathom that level of athletic excellence other than to note it.
And, heroism falls into this category as well, of course. Somebody who transcends their own self-interest, their own limitations and does something miraculous for others that most of us could not do, can bring us to tears–no matter what happens to that person, whether they’re successful, unsuccessful, whether they give up their life, whether they don’t. But, when somebody does put their life on the line and transcends their self-interest and their humanness, in some sense becomes somewhat godly, somewhat angelic–whatever the word that speaks to you is–it can bring us to tears.
And, they’re a very funny tears. They’re not tears of joy, although they’re close. Maybe that’s what they are. They’re not tears of sadness. For me, it’s not the sadness that this is rare: it’s the opposite. It’s the joy that it could happen at all, that there’s that level of perfection.
Susan Cain: That’s really interesting. Though, I do think there’s something about the rarity of it that makes us exclaim over it because there’s a feeling of: Oh, I didn’t know that this could happen because I’m not seeing it every day but here it is. This level of heroism, this level of beauty is actually possible. Yeah. The psychologist, Jonathan Haidt actually calls this moral elevation, the phenomenon that you’re describing. And, I do think it’s part of the same realm.
Russ Roberts: Strangely enough, the phrase that we often use to describe that moment in ourselves as an observer is: ‘It took my breath away.” Which, it’s a gasp, but it also implies I left this world in some dimension: for an instant I died. I couldn’t live in the presence of that magnificence. I don’t think that’s what we mean by it, but it has that implication.
Susan Cain: That’s so interesting. I’ve never heard anyone make that connection before to that phrase, but I completely agree with you. That’s exactly what it’s like.
Russ Roberts: And, why it should? I mean, why should you–it literally does happen. You do stop breathing in the face of that kind of transcendent beauty or performance or magnificence or heroism. You shouldn’t stop breathing, but you do: you gasp. And, you put everything–your physical system–on hold.
Susan Cain: Yeah. That’s very interesting.
Russ Roberts: Talk about home. You just alluded to it. It’s in the book in a number of–many, many places. We do long for home. Why do you think?
Susan Cain: Again–it’s funny; it’s hard to answer these kinds of questions without talking about the spiritual realm because home is the place where–home, I think–in a spiritual sense, home equals Eden. Right? The very idea of home equals the place of actual union, perfect union, perfect love, unconditional love. That’s what we associate it with.
And yet, we’re always falling short of that ideal in one way or another, either because we’ve left home–which is actually what we have to do. We have to go out into the world and leave home. So, even for someone who has had the perfect childhood, you grow up and you leave that childhood and you venture forth, and that is the human experience. And that’s as it should be. But, there’s always a sense of the longing to return there or the longing to build a new home.
And that–actually, leaving the spiritual realm for a second just in the context of everyday life–what we’re really doing all the time is finding new homes everywhere we go, building new homes. So, you build a new home with the family that you have or with the friends that you have.
So, I’m actually at a stage of life where I’m about to be entering the empty-nest phenomenon in the next couple of years. And, it seems completely clear to me that the way to go into that phase is by recreating what home means. That my husband and I will figure out something else. We’ve been so oriented for the last however many years it is around our children, and we’ll still be oriented around them, but in a very different way. And so, we have to build new aspects of a home. Kind of build a different nest in order to feel alive and happy through that time.
And so I think that’s what we do. We are constantly in this process of re-feathering nests, building new ones, and so on. And, that’s the essence of being alive in a healthy way.
Russ Roberts: I have really good news for you about the empty nest. There are downsides. It can be very challenging at times. But, there’s an upside, which is you’re going to get control over the house music again. You will control the Sonos. That’s the way I describe it. So, I get a lot more jazz and Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and Irish folk music since my kids left the nest. I miss them terribly. And, it is a challenging and very bittersweet moment and period. But, the sweet part is you can listen to all the Bach Partitas you want.
Susan Cain: I will say the funny thing about that is: our kids actually more or less like the same music that we do. They went through a brief period of eye-rolling when we would play the music that we like, but it didn’t last long. And, our younger one in particular, he loves the Bob Seger and the old 1970s songs that we will often listen to. He says, ‘This is so much better than contemporary music and the only reason people don’t admit this is because they think they’re not supposed to.’ So, there you go.
Russ Roberts: Okay. It’s not going to work for you. All right. I’ll find something else for you that’ll make you feel good about it.
Russ Roberts: I want to turn to the Buddhist poet, Issa, who–I don’t know if I’m saying his name correctly. Early 1800s, a very short haiku in Japanese. I’m going to read it in English. And, you spent some time riffing on this, and it’s quite powerful. It’s a very simple poem. It goes like this (:
It is true
That this world of dew
Is a world of dew.
But even so….
And that’s the end of the poem. I’m going to read it again. And the word dew is D-E-W, meaning the morning moisture on grass that disappears and burns off during the day. Here we go.
It is true
That this world of dew
Is a world of dew.
But even so….
Why did you include that poem? What’s it say to you?
Susan Cain: Oh, gosh. Okay. So, first of all, Issa, when he wrote this poem, he and his wife had tried to have children. They had all kinds of difficulties in having children. And, they had had babies who had passed away. And then, finally there was born to them a beautiful daughter who was the light of his life. And then, that daughter, too, succumbed–I think it was to smallpox–and she passed away at the age of something like two years old.
And, he was a Buddhist poet, as you said. And so, he was deeply schooled in the Buddhist idea of impermanence. And so, what he’s saying–and what I love so much about this poem–is he’s saying, ‘I get it. I understand that everything is impermanent. I’ve trained all my life to accept loss and to accept impermanence as the state of being. But, even so, but even so, I still am going to mourn and I still am going to rage against this.’
And, what I love about this is that he’s writing this poem to us–who are still reading it 200 years later–because he knows that all human beings go through this exact same experience. And, this is what always gets me about poetry and music in the first place, is that it’s one person writing to another person who they’ll probably never meet, but who they know share the exact same human experience. So it’s the ultimate connection.
And, part of the reason that I think it’s such a loss to not talk about the bittersweet nature of life is that I actually think it’s one of the deepest ways we have of bridging the gap between souls and between humans. The fact that we’re all united in the bittersweetness of human experience is one of the things that brings us together incredibly profoundly.
And so, that’s what you feel when you read this poem that was written by a man who lived 200 years ago who you will never meet and yet you know exactly what he experienced. And he knows yours.
Russ Roberts: You’re right about this Buddhist ideal of acceptance. And, it’s a different kind of transcendence. Transcendence of tragedy, really. And, there’s a tension in your beginnings of a journey on the Buddhist road. And, you seem to be drawn to the idea of non-attachment as it’s called, but also a little bit uncomfortable with it. What’s the tension there for you?
Susan Cain: Well, the tension is that, yes, I am drawn to it and there are ways in which I really do practice it in everyday life, and I can tell you about those in a minute. But, I’m uncomfortable with it because I don’t really believe it’s possible, fully. And, I also believe that the best of human beings is our insistence on attaching. The fact that we mourn when an attachment is broken is one of the most beautiful things about us.
So, where I’ve come to on this–and I’m looking over here because I am sitting in my office right now and I have poetry taped up all around me. And, here I’m just going to bring one down. There’s the Mary Oliver poem, “In Blackwater Woods,” and she says:
… To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it
go,
to let it go.
And, that’s really what I believe. But, I don’t think the letting it go comes without mourning or comes without attachment. It’s just all part of one big glorious package, glorious in its own way.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. That’s a beautiful poem. It reminds me of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, called “One Art.” It starts:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
And, it goes on to break your heart.
And I just will mention that the beginning of your book–near the beginning–is a little quiz on whether you’re a bittersweet person. And one of the test questions is: Do you get goosebumps three times a day or more? I just got them from that Mary Oliver poem. I don’t know what my count is already today. It’s not the first time. But, I got them again from Elizabeth Bishop.
You write in the book about meditation and the Buddhist ideal of non-attachment and acceptance of loss, and I agree with you. I think it’s not just that it’s too hard. I don’t see it as an ideal, and I struggle to see it as an ideal. I’m open to being wrong. But, like you, I think it’s–for me, the kind of losses we’re talking about, which are more than your car keys, is what the bittersweet is about. It’s the acceptance of that pain, the mortality of the things we love, as Mary Oliver puts it. And, that’s what I want to accept. I want to accept the bittersweet, not just the bitter. I want to accept the bittersweet.
Susan Cain: Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And, it’s so funny that Elizabeth Bishop mentions the car keys and so on, because in the book I write about a tribe whose practices I’d come across where they train the mothers of sons. These mothers know that when their sons reach the age of 13, they’re going to leave their mothers’ protection and go forth into the world to become hunters or warriors or whatever it is. And so, the mothers are trained from the time their sons are born to become accustomed to the art of loss, to prepare them for their son becoming 13. And so, they train themselves in losing their proverbial car keys. They have to, every year, give up an item that’s incredibly important to them.
And, I don’t do that myself, but what I do do is think about the stoic practice of memento mori, which means the remembrance of death. So, just to remember at all moments that everything that we love is ephemeral and mortal. And, I know that to some people that sounds like a depressing practice, but I find it to be really the opposite, because it just makes you attune to the preciousness of everything.
And, I started doing this in particular when my sons were little and we had our nighttime bedtime ritual, which was always one of the sweetest times of the day. And I was going through a period where, as much as it was one of the sweetest times of the day, I was also incredibly busy with work, and I would sometimes bring my cell phone in with me to bedtime. And, if my son looked away at whatever he was distracted by, I would steal a look at my cell phone. And then, I started doing this practice of remembering: I could be gone tomorrow, he could be gone tomorrow. We don’t know anything. And that completely changed the tenor of these bedtimes. It wasn’t just easy to leave the phone in another room. It was like, of course I was going to leave the phone in another room. And, again, not because I was depressed about it, but just because: Oh, this is precious.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I often send–it’s about one minute long. It’s Gretchen Rubin. I’m going to–interestingly–get to reference Gretchen Rubin in a minute. But, Gretchen Rubin created a one-minute video called “The Days Are Long, but the Years Are Short.” It makes me cry, actually, every time I watch it. And, I’m choking up a little bit now, just even referencing it without seeing it, because it captures what you’re talking about and reminds you about what’s precious.
When my kids were little, I would remind myself: She’s only going to be two-years-three-months in one day, for one day; and that day is different than the day before it and the day after. And, it’s unique, and I want to savor it as much as I can. I didn’t quit my job and live off the land or anything, but I did try to remember the transience of the mortality of that day, and that week, and that month. And, anyone out there with children, anyone out there listening, it’s precious advice.
We’ll put a link up to the Gretchen Rubin video because it gets you. It’s really something.
Susan Cain: I love that. I love that.
And, I will say, going back to the idea of, that we can continually rebuild our homes: My kids are teenagers now, and so the relationship with them is completely different, but so amazing in its own way. And so, I feel like relationships are like that. You’re just constantly rebuilding the home in which you live, or redecorating it. And, you love it just as much as the one before, but it’s differens.
Russ Roberts: That’s a nice image. I really like that.
So, I was going to mention Gretchen Rubin anyway, but you had an interview with her, and someone responded to that interview and said–referring to something tough in her life–‘When I think of these events, it’s not the sadness I remember. It is the union between souls. When we experience sadness, we share in a common suffering.’
You know, I like the expression: Everyone’s in a battle, so be kind. We usually forget that. We think we’re the only ones in a battle, and we look at everybody else and they–they’re so damn happy or cheerful or okay, and I’m having such a hard time here, and what’s wrong with me? That saying reminds you that we’re all in a battle, and I think that’s true. And, that quote gets at something powerful. Talk about that.
Susan Cain: Yeah. I love that quote. That actually came–it’s funny–that was from years before I even started writing Bittersweet. I think it was soon after Gretchen had come out with the Happiness Project; and she asked me what my vision of happiness was. I think it was for her blog. And, I think that was probably–now that I think about it–the first time I talked about this. I said, ‘Well, there’s this thing called the happiness of melancholy.’ Which is actually even what I was going to call this book at the beginning, but my publisher didn’t like that title.
Russ Roberts: Not as good.
Susan Cain: Yeah. There you go. So, I wrote about the happiness of melancholy and this person wrote in talking about–I think she was talking about her grandfather’s funeral and how it was the first time she had seen her father cry, at that funeral; and that there was a barbershop chorus that sang really beautifully. And, she described it as this union between souls.
And, this gets to the idea that we were talking about with Issa, that there’s something about going through those kinds of experiences together that is incredibly uniting. And it also makes us aware of everyone on a kind of soul level: that it’s not just the guy down the street; that’s another soul alongside yours and that we’re all united.
And, I guess that can sound as if it’s operating on a kind of woo(?) level. But, one of the interesting pieces of research that I found through this book comes from Dacher Keltner, the amazing psychologist at Berkeley. And, he studied the way in which we all have in our bodies the vagus nerve. And, this is the biggest bundle nerve collection in our bodies, that regulates–it’s very ancient, evolutionarily speaking. It regulates our digestion, breathing, hunger–everything. So, it’s a very fundamental old part of ourselves as organisms.
And, that same piece of us–that vagus nerve–reacts when we see another being in distress. So, I see you in distress, my vagus nerve becomes distressed as well. And, this suggests that on some very basic and fundamental level, we really are drawn to each other and noticing each other’s pain and united by it. God knows, it doesn’t mean we always react this way, but we have this capacity.
And, I think it’s something we should be thinking about more. Even Darwin, by the way–Charles Darwin, who is known for the concept of the survival of the fittest–Darwin also noticed this. And, he actually called this the strongest–I don’t remember the exact words, but it’s in his book, The Descent of Man. He calls it–the strongest impulse in animals is to react in this way to noticing the suffering of other animals. So, yeah. There it is.
Russ Roberts: And you link to a video, which we’ll also link to–really extraordinary beautiful ad–but more than an ad. It’s for the Cleveland Clinic. Describe that video. It’s potentially life-changing. It’s a remarkable bit of encouragement to be someone better than you already are.
Susan Cain: Yeah. I just got goosebumps just thinking about that video. So, this was a video that the Cleveland Clinic put together just to train its healthcare workers in empathy. It ended up going viral. Which, if you’re listening to this and you go watch it, you’ll see why.
Okay. So, this video, it pans through the corridors of a hospital. And the video stops on the faces of just random people who are walking through this hospital just the way you would if you were walking through a hospital. Except in this case, the video gives you captions underneath each human to show you what that human is going through at that moment. And so, for one person, there’s a little girl and it says she’s saying goodbye to her father for the last time. And there’s another caption for a man who is been waiting for a heart transplant for years. And, you see all these different captions, and you realize: Oh my gosh, everybody has a caption. Not just in the hospital corridors, but all of us have captions.
And, even in the video, some of the captions are happy captions. Someone is about to get married. But, I think about this all the time now. Like, I go into the grocery store and I think, ‘Oh, what are the captions of the cashier who I’m chatting with right now? What are the captions of this person or that person?’ And, you may never know what they are, but it makes you interact with them in a completely different way.
Russ Roberts: And, there’s no dialogue, if I remember correctly. No one speaks. They’re just walking along and you notice them, as you say, as if you’re walking past them. And, usually you don’t give them a second’s thought because you’re trapped in your own captions.
And, one of the powerful, I think part of that video is to remind you that those other people have inner lives a lot like yours. They have your fears, your dreams, your tragedies, your successes, your victories, your losses. It’s a beautiful, beautiful piece of theater. It’s so well done, for a minute I actually thought it might’ve been real that they just walked through the hospital with a handheld camera. But they’re actors. I’m pretty sure.
Susan Cain: Oh, is that true?
Russ Roberts: Yeah. They’re actors.
Susan Cain: I also assumed it was real, but I never really gave too much thought to the production of it.
Russ Roberts: Well, it’s so good that, like any great piece of acting and theater, you forget that you’re watching acting and you’re drawn into it and you empathize. Your vagus nerve lights up and your mirror neurons fire and so on.
Russ Roberts: Let’s talk for a minute about America. You talk about how the American attitude is sunny, not so much bittersweet. And, some of the challenges that young people have–we’ve talked about on the program before–that young people have in today’s world, where they’re expected to be extremely happy all the time. And of course they’re not.
Susan Cain: Yeah. And, that expectation for young people, especially on college campuses, has a name that I discovered when I went to interview people, and the name for it is ‘effortless perfection.’ So, it’s the idea that college students have that they’re supposed to present as extremely social, affable, happy, great grades, great conversationalists, great athletes, well-dressed, all the rest of it. And not only all these things, not only all this happiness, but also it’s all supposed to come effortlessly. So, you’re supposed to present as if it does.
And, that can take a real toll on people. And, it’s very interesting. When you tell Americans that in other cultures, it’s not necessarily expected that people should be smiling all the time, that’s shocking to Americans because of course you’re supposed to present that way.
And I think I wrote about this in the book. I think I had my first encounter with this when seeing a photo album–someone I knew who grew up in Eastern Europe–and I was looking through the photo album from his teenage years and all his friends are staring unsmilingly at the camera. And I had never seen anything like it. But, for them, that was the cool way to appear in photographs. Whereas I can think of years’ of my teenage photographs that I used to hang on my walls–and I had collages of them–and every single one it smile, smile, smile. So, we don’t realize the extent to which that’s actually a cultural dictate as opposed to a given way of being.
Russ Roberts: And, when I hear about that photograph, I think the word that comes to my mind is ‘grim.’ And, when I think about the American selfie, it’s ‘drunken ecstasy.’ It’s: ‘I’m not just happy. I’m not just smiling. I am delirious with joy.’ Listeners, I apologize, but it’s very relevant: I used to have a Russian friend–I don’t live near him anymore, I haven’t seen him in a long time–but an acquaintance. And, I’d see him and I’d say, ‘How are you?’ And, he’d say, ‘Fine, like all Americans.’ Because in the Soviet Union, you weren’t fine. And, you told the truth: you shrugged, you groaned, whatever it was.
I want to remind listeners, by the way, that we’re going to be reading Life and Fate together by Vasily Grossman. If you want to read it before I talk to Tyler Cowen about it, that will probably will air toward the end of November, around November 25th or so. So, get reading: it’s a 872-page book. And there’s not a lot of happiness in it, but it’s bittersweet. It’s an amazing book. Really a masterpiece.
Susan Cain: You are reminding me of a virtual event that I did with a company. I think we were talking about The Power of Introverts (Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking) at this company, and it was over Zoom. At the beginning of the Zoom call, as they often do, they were asking people, you know, ‘Type into the chat box your name and where you’re dialing in from. And how are you feeling today?’ And, every single person said, ‘Awesome, excited, thrilled to be here.’ Yay, yay, yay. I thought it’s just statistically impossible that all these people are having this particular array of emotions. That’s what we have to present.
Russ Roberts: Yeah. I would have typed in ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’
Russ Roberts: Okay. Back to something a little more serious. I want to talk about loneliness. I want to read one more poem. We talked earlier, a few minutes ago, about the union of suffering and the common suffering and the union of between souls. And, I think the flip side of that is loneliness, or alone-ness. They’re not quite the same thing. But, Thomas Wolfe, I think said it as well as anyone. I think it’s from Look Homeward, Angel. And, it’s a great, bittersweet passage. It goes like this:
… a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.
Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.
Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?
O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?
O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.
End of quote.
And what Thomas Wolfe is saying–he’s not the first one; in fact, it’s an eternal theme in literature–is that aloneness is our fundamental state as human beings. And isn’t, in some sense, that the essence of the bittersweet that we’re talking about?
Susan Cain: I don’t know. Because to me, I guess this is a theme I keep returning to. I think there’s something about the bittersweet that is fundamentally connecting and the opposite of aloneness. I think the aloneness comes from not telling the truth about human experience and feeling that you’re alone in it.
And, to me, the answer to the mystery of: We started out talking about of why it is that we love sad music so much–it doesn’t make sense, why would anyone want to feel sad?–is that the composer and the music itself is telling you that you’re not alone. Like they’re sharing everything they feel and everything they know to be true. And you listen to it and you say, ‘Oh, that’s what I know to be true, also.’ And you’re the opposite of alone in that moment.
I think it’s like a great tidal wave of love when you hear music like that or poetry like that. Like, I think that’s why we read. I think that’s why we create. That’s why we do all of this. There’s a fundamental connection that comes from those acts and from that form of telling the truth. (More to come, 43:35)
