The sorrow that turns sweet

It was the phrase ‘sad sweet feeling in your heart’ that arrested my attention. But who would have thought it would have been Abraham Lincoln who found those words?

I’ve been searching for an adequate description of something we’ve all experienced but which is rarely discussed. Many years ago, beachcombing for pithily disobliging quotes for Scorn, my anthology of insult and invective, I was arrested by a remark of Samuel Johnson’s. ‘Depend upon it,’ Boswell quotes the great man as saying, ‘that, if a man talks of his misfortunes, there is something in them that is not disagree-able to him; for where there is nothing but pure misery, there never is any recourse to the mention of it.’

As ever, Dr Johnson pinpoints a truth with accuracy but perhaps cynicism: enough cynicism for me to include his remark in my collection. Yet it keeps coming back to me: more interesting than as just a sharp-tongued reference to the pleasures of wallowing in self-pity. Why did I so often hear friends and relations talking with great sadness about those they had loved and lost, yet never hear my grandmother mention the dreadful death of her tiny daughter from meningitis?

Never except once. I had asked her what music she liked. She replied that she stopped listening to music when her little girl was taken from her, because anything beautiful now made her sad. Then she changed the subject, which was never raised again. Poor Grandma, for whom the daughter had not had time to grow to be a friend, knew only what Johnson calls ‘pure misery’ from her loss.

Behind the archness, I think the great lexicographer was hinting at the difference between the sorrow that remains pure grief, and the sorrow that can nourish. I’ve kept up this column for more than 20 years now, and no essay I’ve written here has met more fellow-feeling from readers than one I wrote not long after the death of my father.