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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

“Despite what dictionaries would have us believe, this world is still mostly undefined.”

Art by Marc Martin from We Are Starlings The title, though beautiful, is misleading — the emotional states Koenig defines are not obscure but, despite their specificity, profoundly relatable and universal; they are not sorrows but emissaries of the bittersweet, with all its capacity for affirming the joy of being alive: maru mori(“the heartbreaking simplicity of ordinary things”), apolytus(“the moment you realize you are changing as a person, finally outgrowing your old problems like a reptile shedding its skin”), the wends(“the frustration that you’re not enjoying an experience as much as you should… as if your heart had been inadvertently demagnetized by a surge of expectations”), anoscetia(“the anxiety of not knowing ‘the real you'”), dès vu(“the awareness that this moment will become a memory”). Koenig composites his imaginative etymologies from a multitude of sources: names and places from folklore and pop culture, terms from chemistry and astronomy, the existing lexicon of languages living and dead, from Latin and Ancient Greek to Japanese and Māori. AGNOSTHESIA n. the state of not knowing how you really feel about something, which forces you to sift through clues hidden in your own behavior, as if you were some other person — noticing a twist of acid in your voice, an obscene amount of effort you put into something trifling, or an inexplicable weight on your shoulders that makes it difficult to get out of bed.

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