black ink

Today for no particular reason, I was sad, sadder than I've been in a long, long time. As I usually do, I told myself something I once read in a list of quotations on the back page of a magazine: an occasional despair is the wages of existence and the common inheritance of mankind. Not exactly felicitously phrased, but it gets across the cheering idea that, right this very minute, somewhere not too far away, someone else is miserable too.

Schadenfreude can be -- often is -- nothing more or less than malicious glee, the reason we laugh when someone slips on a banana peel or Wile E Coyote falls off a cliff. But schadenfreude can also be something much softer and gentler -- sympathy turned inside-out.

Years and years ago, heartbroken, I lay on my bed and obsessively read Shakespeare's sonnets. And, yes, it was partly because I couldn't concentrate for more than fourteen lines at a time and because I was trying to distract myself with an analysis of the meter and the rhymes and the sounds that resurfaced in different forms and shapes. But mostly it was because I wanted to tell myself, to keep telling myself, that once, four hundred years before, someone had felt as much in love and exactly as sad as I did now.