56 pages • 1-hour read
Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole
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Part 1, Chapters 1-2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Sorrow and Longing: How Can We Transform Pain into Creativity, Transcendence, and Love?”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “How Should We Cope with Lost Love?”
The first part of this chapter takes the form of a memoir. Cain discusses her early childhood and the natural connection she had toward her mother. The bond was very tight, and she recalls fondly some early childhood memories. She also reveals that her grandfather was a rabbi who had escaped Nazi Germany, though most of the rest of his family and loved ones were killed. As Cain grew older and entered adolescence, a tension arose between her and her mother. Cain mentions that the tragedies her mother experienced caused her to be full of fear and worry. She imposed strict rules on her daughter and expected that Cain would follow in the family’s tradition of Orthodox Judaism. The pair would have many clashes because of this growing tension, and Cain soon became full of anxiety that if she stepped out of line, a fight would erupt. The imposition of expectations coupled with her mother’s fragility created a burden in Cain’s life, and as she approached her college years, she couldn’t wait to leave her mother’s home. While the focus is on her mother, it is also worth mentioning that while her mother is Orthodox Jewish, her father was surreptitiously atheist. Cain labels herself skeptical and feels uneasy about adopting religious beliefs, much to her mother’s dismay. Cain also points out that even though she and her mother had many arguments, they would always find a way to resolve the disputes.
Cain delves into her acceptance into Princeton University and then describes her first year. Her mother was still trying to keep a firm hold on her, while Cain was trying to enjoy her first year away. Cain describes some of the threats made by her mother to have her pulled from the university if her behavior did not improve. She began journaling and she soon found herself expressing her increasing animosity toward her mother. As she packed her things at the end of the school year, she inadvertently handed over the journals to her mother. Her mother read the journals and discovered her daughter’s innermost thoughts about life, specifically the way she viewed her mother. This discovery forever strained their relationship, and while they eventually became cordial and civil to each other, and even fell into old habits such as saying “I love you” to each other, Cain recognized that her relationship with the mother of her childhood was forever gone. Cain recognizes her response to this loss by internalizing her feelings of guilt for being careless about her journals and for writing with such antipathy toward her mother. However, she also realizes that her mother invaded her privacy and could have very easily left the journals alone, and for this, Cain carries some resentment.
Cain explains her motivation for including the anecdote about her mother. She presents it as a form of loss, and while she recognizes that her loss may be a different kind of loss than the reader’s own experiences, her point is that it taught her about the dualistic nature of joy and grief. Her motivation, therefore, is to write about her experience and inform the reader what she learned from it. She asks the reader to consider how one is supposed to “integrate” the bitter and the sweet, and then provides a two-fold answer. First, she says that one should confront their losses to seek understanding. Secondly, one should accept that some losses will never fully heal; they will always be tender no matter how much a person tries to overcome them. This leads Cain into a discussion of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which was founded by psychologist Steven Hayes and guides people toward accepting loss and grief in a way that enables them to move on. This therapy does not try to resist suffering; instead, practitioners learn to accept it as a necessary and unavoidable part of life. Once a person develops this skill, they can then have more focus and commitment to the things that really matter to them in their lives. Cain discusses the poet Maya Angelou’s memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a work both dark and uplifting. Cain describes the effect the book had on Oprah Winfrey, who saw similarities between Angelou’s life and her own, and provided her inspiration for overcoming her own traumatic childhood. Cain discusses how, to process their own grief, people seek to heal others. She refers to these people as “wounded healers” (50).
Cain then transitions into a description of loving-kindness meditation and how she first came to practice it. She introduces Sharon Salzberg, a leading teacher and figure in the practice known as Metta. Salzberg’s story is one of trauma and loss, and Metta provided her with a way to overcome the loss and grief of her youth. Eventually, Cain became friends with Salzberg and through her friend’s guidance, she was able to better process the tumultuous relationship she had with her mother. As the chapter concludes, Cain revisits the relationship with her mother, this time in the present. Her mother suffers from Alzheimer’s disease and does not show any signs of hostility toward Cain. As Cain discusses the relationship, which is now much different, she signals that she feels remorse about the past, and realizes that eventually, her mother will pass on. As she reflects on the relationship, she credits her mother for being the best mother that she could have been.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary: “Why Do We Long for ‘Perfect’ and Unconditional Love? (And What Does This Have to Do with Our Love of Sad Songs, Rainy Days, and Even the Divine?)”
Cain begins the chapter by providing a synopsis of the novel The Bridges of Madison County. She disagrees that the reason why the book and the movie adaptation are so popular is because women connect with the unhappy marriage the main character, Francesca, finds herself in. She argues that the book causes readers to question whether the true love of a soulmate really exists. She presents opposing views on the question. From the practical side, there is no such thing. Cain mentions the view of Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium, in which it is claimed that there is such a thing. She then introduces an article written by Swiss philosopher Alain de Botton that argues against the concept of an ideal or true love. Cain describes a seminar that she attended conducted by de Botton in which the philosopher interacts with his audience and demonstrates to them why such idealized love poses a problem in romantic relationships. When compared against the ideal, almost nobody will seem good enough. Cain uses this anecdote to probe into the source for why people would believe that a soulmate exists, and she locates this in an innate sense of yearning that we all have. She claims that romantic love is a manifestation of yearning much in the way sad music is. She discusses a viral video of a two-year-old boy who weeps when he first hears “Moonlight Sonata.” Viewers of the video, according to Cain, are able to sense something deep in the boy’s reaction that connects to the melancholy within themselves. She points to a study that indicates that people listen to sad songs more than quadruple the rate they listen to happy songs, and she discusses how various cultures all have performance art that is bittersweet. Cain argues that sad music has a cathartic effect on people, which explains why people are instinctively drawn to it.
Cain argues that the reasons people are drawn to music that is sad and beautiful at the same time is that it initiates a form of longing that is at the core of being human. She mentions various eminent figures such as Plato and C. S. Lewis, who all attempt to articulate this sense of longing. She also mentions that longing is a significant muse for artists and others who attempt to express the melancholy of longing. She mentions Flamenco dancing as an example, in addition to art forms from other cultures. She says that separation and the longing for reunion are at the heart of these traditions and that ultimately it is a longing for the divine. Cain introduces a friend of hers named Tara who is a practicing Sufi, which is a branch of Islam. Cain recognizes in her friend’s story that her own tendency to associate with melancholy is a spiritual exercise, even as she insists that she is agnostic. Cain further explores Sufism and the writings of the poet Rumi, who was an original practitioner. His work exemplifies the pain of separation, the longing for a perfect world, and the catharsis that comes from melancholy. She introduces Dr. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (LVM), a Sufi teacher whose lectures Cain discovers on YouTube. She attempts to meet the man in person and attends one of his retreats, seeking to learn more about Sufism and how it compares to Buddhism. Cain initially sees the two as incompatible because while Sufism teaches one to embrace their longing, Buddhism teaches one to overcome their desire. As she attends the retreat and listens to LVM speak, he announces to the audience that he will no longer be their teacher. Many of those in attendance are surprised, and some are upset. There is a Q & A later on in which Cain gets the chance to ask LVM her question about the Buddhist/ Sufi comparison. LVM provides a distinction, mentioning that desire is a craving of the ego, which Buddhism seeks to overcome, and it is not the same as longing. LVM then implores Cain, and his audience, that longing is not something to avoid; instead, one should embrace it fully as it is the most internal connection to love.
As Cain nears the end of the chapter, she returns to The Bridges of Madison County and provides what she thinks is the reason why the book is so popular. She insists that Francesca’s affair represents a longing for a love that once consummated can never quite return. Her departure from her lover represents this fact and in Cain’s view, it is a fact that all people, at some point in their lives, will experience. It is a beautiful experience, but the transience of life also endows it with sadness because no matter how people seek to recapture it, it is gone. This emotional dualism is at the heart of the book and is why the book and movie are so popular.
Part 1, Chapters 1-2 Analysis
The title for Part 1 is presented in the form of a question: “How can we transform pain into creativity, transcendence, and love?” (33) which establishes a pattern that the book follows. Each part begins with a general question that is related to one of the book’s central themes. Cain then attempts to provide coherent answers to the questions with support and evidence from various fields of inquiry such as religion, technology, science, medicine, and philosophy.
As she begins the first chapter, Cain dives into her own autobiography. She discusses the relationship she had with her mother, both as a child and as a young adult. Because she has such fond memories of how her mother treated her as a child, the tension and conflict that arose as she grew older felt like loss to Cain. She often longed for the mother of her childhood. Cain says,
If in high school we’d followed a repeating pattern of separation and reunion, now the mother of my childhood had simply vanished. In her place was a vengeful woman who telephoned daily with accusations of malfeasance, who stood for hours at my bedroom door during college vacations, threatening that if I didn’t ‘wise up,’ she’d pull me out of Princeton so she could keep an eye on me (40).
Cain later in the book acknowledges that this sense of loss is not equivalent to an actual death. However, for Cain, the devastation of her relationship to her mother that takes place when her mother discovers Cain’s personal journals is effectively a death. She says, “I felt that I was, in some psychologically true point of fact, my mother’s killer” (41). The conflicted relationship with her mother is a source of sorrow and grief, one that helps Cain demonstrate to the reader her authenticity and her experience with sorrow, thereby affecting an appeal to ethos.
In Chapter 2, Cain digs deeper into the fundamental question that she presented in the book’s introduction, namely why sad music is as popular and uplifting as it is. Cain attributes this to a sense of longing that she feels is fundamental to the human experience. She describes a viral video of a two-year-old boy who, while at a piano recital of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” begins weeping: “he’s so moved by the haunting melody that his whole face strains with the doomed effort not to cry. He lets loose a whimper, and then the tears stream silently down his cheeks. There’s something profound, almost sacred, in his reaction to the music” (71). She then argues that “most people seemed to sense that the best of humanity, and its deepest questions, lay written like a secret code in the boy’s sorrow” (71). Cain then presents a few comments from observers and then remarks, “But what is it, exactly, that makes bittersweet music like ‘Moonlight Sonata’ so exalting? How can the same stimulus speak simultaneously of joy and sorrow, love and loss—and why are we so keen to listen?” (71). Cain is attempting to illustrate with the example of the boy that his response to the music is an almost pure expression of longing. It is this that causes the boy to cry when he hears the music, and it is the reason why sad or melancholy music is generally listened to far more than happy music. Cain provides data conducted from research to validate the claim, but her primary point is the universality of the human attachment to sad music. She sums this up by saying, “Upbeat tunes make us want to dance around our kitchens and invite friends for dinner. But it’s sad music that makes us want to touch the sky” (73). Contrary to what people might expect, Cain asserts that it is sad music, not happy music, that makes us feel uplifted.
Later in the book, Cain probes deeper into the consequences of emotion suppression, but she touches upon it in Chapter 2 when she says, “The idea of longing as a sacred and generative force seems very odd in our culture of normative sunshine. But it’s traveled the world for centuries, under many different names, taking many different forms” (74). Cain’s intention here is to establish the basis for her position that we should not only embrace moments when we feel melancholy, we should actively seek out such opportunities because they ultimately lift us up and allow us to experience life in more authentic, growth-driven ways. Listening to sad music, or performing it, is one of the many ways that allow us to experience the “perfect and beautiful world” (23) that we long for as human beings, which in Cain’s estimation, helps us to transcend ourselves.
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