When I was in my early 30s,
I was an associate at a Wall Street law firm.
And I had been working 16-hour days for seven years straight.
And even though, ever since I was four years old,
I'd had this beautiful and impossible dream
of becoming a writer,
I was also pretty ambitious and on the verge of making partner.
Or so I thought.
Because, one day, a senior partner named Steve Shalen
knocked on my office door.
Steve was tall and distinguished and very decent.
And he sat down and he reached for the squishy stress ball on my desk,
and he said that I wasn't going to be making partner after all.
And I remember very badly wishing that I had a stress ball too,
but Steve Shalen was using mine.
And I remember feeling sorry that it had fallen to Steve
to be the one to tell me this news,
because he really was a good guy.
And I remember bursting into tears right in front of him,
such a nonpartnerish thing to do.
But that very afternoon I up and left my law firm for good.
And a few weeks after that ended a seven-year relationship
that had always felt wrong.
And so, now I was in my early 30s,
and suddenly I had no career,
no love, no place to live.
And immediately, I fell into a relationship
with a handsome musician
who liked to compose lyrics by day
and stand around a piano with friends, singing, at night.
And he was the wrong guy for various reasons,
but my feelings for him
developed into this crazy obsession,
the likes of which I have never experienced before or since, thankfully.
No matter what I did, I couldn't escape it.
Until one day, a friend said to me,
“You are this hooked
because he represents something you're longing for.
What are you longing for?"
And the answer came to me with a sudden clarity.
It was like, of course,
he was the writing life
that I had longed for since I was four years old.
He was an emissary from the beautiful world.
And just like that, the obsession fell away,
and I started writing for real.
Today, I want to talk with you about a state of mind
that's ancient and universal
and enormously powerful
and, strangely, these days overlooked.
The author C.S. Lewis called this state of mind
"the inconsolable longing for we know not what."
And he was mesmerized by it all his life.
As am I.
When I was 22 years old and I was still in law school,
some friends came by my dorm room
to pick me up on the way to class.
And I had been sitting and listening to bittersweet music,
which is something I've been doing all my life.
(Music: "Adagio in G Minor" by Albinoni)
(Music ends)
OK, so the music is a little bit gloomy.
It's full of longing, right?
Maybe for a lost love that never existed in the first place,
but the curious thing is,
when I hear music like this,
I don't really feel sad or not very sad.
What I actually feel is something that's much closer to joy.
And I could never understand why this was.
But meanwhile, I noticed that my law school classmates
were feeling very little joy.
One of them asked me why I was listening to funeral music.
(Laughter)
And I laughed, and we went off to class.
End of story.
Except that I thought about that comment of his
for literally the next 25 years.
Why do I find sad music so uplifting?
And what is it in our culture
that makes it feel a fitting subject for a joke?
And why, even right this minute,
do I feel an intense desire to assure you that I love dance music too?
I really do.
At first, these were just interesting questions,
but as I looked for the answers over the years,
I started to realize that, really, they were the questions.
They were the big ones,
I just hadn't known it yet.
So here's what I found out.
Lots of people feel the way I do about sad music,
especially sensitive types.
People play the happy songs on their playlists
about 175 times on average,
but they play the sad songs 800 times.
And they tell researchers that they associate sad music
with beauty and wonder and transcendence,
the so-called sublime emotions.
And you know, just think of how many musical genres
tap into sorrow, right.
There’s Spanish flamenco and Portuguese fado
and the Irish lament
and American country music and the blues.
And then even lullabies,
which all over the world we often use our most heartbreaking melodies
to sing our newborns to sleep.
Why on Earth do we do that?
(Laughter)
And then it's not just music, right?
We like rainy days and tragic drama
and cherry blossoms,
which we celebrate over equally lovely flowers
partly because they die young.
Philosophers call that the paradox of tragedy.
Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow
when the rest of the time we will quite naturally
do anything we can to avoid it?
There's actually a scholarly debate raging over this question,
but I have come to believe
that really, what we are craving,
at bottom,
is that state of longing,
that joy that's laced with sorrow.
Which is often triggered
when we experience something so exquisite
that it seems to come to us from some other world.
And this is why we give painters and rock stars
such exalted status.
Because they're the ones who bring us the breath of magic
from that other place.
Except it only lasts a moment,
and we really want to live there for good.
Because we know that we live in a deeply flawed world.
And we have this stubborn conviction
that we come from a perfect and beautiful one
that remains forever out of reach.
And maybe that sounds depressing to you,
but this state of mind,
this longing,
is actually the deep source
of all our moonshots and our loves.
It's because of longing
that we play "Moonlight Sonatas"
and build rockets to Mars.
And it's because we're all in this same strange state of exile
that we have the capacity to empathize with each other in the first place.
Our broken hearts,
taught an 18-century rabbi named Nahman of Bratslav,
they connect us to each other
and to that other world where the music comes form.
But modern culture is telling us a really different story.
It's telling us to smile and get over it and move on.
And of course it's true,
positivity is very powerful as well.
And it's possible to get stuck in your longing
and to never come out.
So I do want to be really clear,
this is not an argument for depression.
And --
(Laughter)
If that's what you think you're experiencing,
please, please do go seek help.
I'm talking about a different state of mind that we all live in,
where the light and the dark move together.
And I am saying that right now,
our culture is afraid of the dark.
And that all this normative sunshine
can distract you from your rightful heritage.
In Homer's "Odyssey,"
it was homesickness,
it was the longing for home
that caused Odysseus to take that epic journey in the first place.
The poem starts with him weeping on a beach.
And in most every children's book you've ever loved,
the hero is an orphan first.
Think of Harry Potter --
broken before the story even starts.
Longing is also the beating heart, of course,
of most of the world's religions.
We long for Eden and Zion,
and we long for the Beloved,
which is the beautiful word the Sufis have for God.
So sometime after I left my law firm and the musician,
I met Ken, who would become my husband.
Ken is a writer, too,
and he had spent the past decade
doing UN peacekeeping negotiations
in Rwanda and Liberia and Somalia.
And he had done that work
because underneath his very exuberant personality,
he was filled with his own longing for another world.
He'd grown up haunted by the Holocaust.
He used to lie awake at night when he was 10 years old
wondering would he have had the guts to hide Anne Frank in his attic.
And it turned out that he did have the courage,
even if his dreams of peace never did come true.
To this day, he keeps on his desk
a photo of a pile of bones from the Rwandan genocide.
When we met,
Ken was getting ready to publish a book on his experiences,
and it was getting optioned for TV.
And in contrast, I had this failed legal career
and some poems that I had written.
At the time, I was working on a memoir in sonnet form,
because why not.
But I brought the sonnets to our second date,
and I showed them to Ken.
And later that night,
this is the email that he sent me.
[Holy Sh*t. My favorite line:
I'm Penelope's descendant/ Heiress to a life transcendent
Keep writing. Drop Everything. Write. Write woman, write.]
(Laughter and applause)
So Ken's exuberant faith
helped to make my longing a reality.
But those dreams of peace he had had,
you know, we're all still waiting for those, right?
Which is the way it often goes,
the beautiful world just out of reach.
But while we're waiting,
our broken hearts can also help to connect us.
(Music: "Adagio in G Minor" by Albinoni)
(Music ends)
In 1992,
the city of Sarajevo was under siege.
For centuries, Muslims, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox
had lived together in this very vibrant city.
And now, the streets were dead quiet.
Except for the crackling sounds of the snipers' gunshots.
Until one day,
when a bombed-out bakery
filled with the strains of Albinoni's "Adagio in G Minor,"
which is what you've just been listening to,
thanks to the otherworldly talents of my dear friend, Min Kym.
(Applause)
The Albinoni that day was played by Vedran Smailović,
the lead cellist of the Sarajevo Opera,
in honor of 22 people who had been killed the morning before,
as they lined up for bread.
Dressed in a formal white shirt and black tails,
as if for a night at the opera,
he sat down on a white plastic chair
on a mound of rubble,
and he played his cello.
And he did that every day for 22 days
under sniper fire that never stopped him.
"You ask me am I crazy to play my cello in the middle of a war zone,"
he said,
"Why don't you ask them if they're crazy for shelling Sarajevo?"
A few months after that,
the BBC foreign correspondent, Allan Little, writes
that he watched as a procession of 40,000 people
emerged from a nearby forest.
They had been walking for 48 hours to flee a military attack.
And among them was an old man.
He was dazed and exhausted.
And he asked Allan Little,
"Have you seen my wife,
we got separated in the forest,
I don't know whether she's made it."
And Little said to him,
"Do you mind if I ask you, are you a Muslim or a Croat?"
And the old man's answer, he says,
shames him even now, as he recalls it across the decades.
"I am," said the old man,
"a musician."
(Music: "Adagio in G Minor")
(Music ends)
In Hebrew, the word for longing, leh-heesh-toh-kek,
it comes from the same word,
from the same root,
as the word for passion.
The place you suffer is the same exact place
where you care desperately.
It's the same place that inspires you to ease someone's pain however you can.
And it's the place that you vibrate
with the insane beauty of this world.
So, remember, there's light and there's dark.
And when the dark times come,
and they will come,
don't be surprised,
but ask yourself: What are you longing for?
And follow your longing where it's telling you to go.
It's pointing you in the direction of the sacred.
If you don't like that word sacred, I get it,
call it the wondrous instead.
You don't, you absolutely don't have to believe
in the deities of the ancient books
to know that spiritual longing is real,
and that humanity is steeped in the sublime.
Once you look, you will see it everywhere around you.
It's in the arch of your best friend's eyebrow
when she makes a joke.
It's in the smallpox vaccines and the Golden Gate bridges
that humans somehow managed to invent
against all odds.
It's in the surge of love you feel for a cellist
who did a brave and miraculous thing
during a misbegotten war in 1992.
And it's right here in this room.
Follow your longing where it’s telling you to go,
and may it carry you straight to the beating heart
of the perfect and beautiful world.
Thank you so much.
(Applause)