Koenig, John. Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Simon & Schuster New York 2021. ??;2/26

There are quite a few surprising things about this strange book. For sure an ordinary dictionary it isn’t – not alphabetical, not putatively exhaustive. My first surprise was the author. As I looked him up online I was expecting an elderly bespectacled Scandinavian, but here was this cheery ordinary looking young American face, familiar and ingenuous. Next was the failure of most of his neologisms to line up for me with what he had to say. The words themselves didn’t seem to mean or matter that much. And I found the tone and content reaching for a colloquial but profound cobbled-together description of the human condition. Some parts of this unusual book were better than others.

Mr. Koenig talks convincingly about being heavily into language and words. My impression was that his ideas about the human condition were closer to the centre of things. That said he did point out with this Wittgenstein quote that he appreciates how inseparable language and that condition are:

The limits of my language are the limits of my world.

I want to come at this by listing a few of the entries I found intriguing, some with my comments. Then a couple or so that didn’t seem to mean as much. Finally I’ll see if I can sum up what I think Mr. Koenig is talking about.

heartspur n. an unexpected surge of emotion in response to a seemingly innocuous trigger—the distinctive squeal of a rusty fence, a key change in an old pop song, the hint of a certain perfume—which feels all the more intense because you can’t quite pin it down.

(I seem to have this kind of experience quite often)

fool’s guilt n. a pulse of shame you feel even though you’ve done nothing wrong—passing a police car while under the speed limit, being carded after legally ordering a drink, or exiting a store without buying anything.

(happens to me all the time.)

tillid adj. humbled by how readily you place your life into the hands of random strangers, often without a second thought—trusting a restaurant to check its expiration dates, trusting a construction crew not to cheap out on materials, trusting thousands of other drivers to stay in their lane—people who you may never meet but whose well-being you’re deeply invested in, whether you know it or not.

TICHLOCH. The anxiety of never knowing how much time you have left. Time is an odd sort of currency. You’re free to spend it or squander it as you will, but no matter how you choose to budget your remaining years, they’ re only ever dispensed in tiny micropayments, cent by cent, heartbeat by heartbeat, tick after tock after tick. Which means you have no way of knowing how much of it you have left.

epistrix n. a disconcerting cluster of endings that all seem to happen at once; a random barrage of departures and closures and divorces and series finales and celebrity deaths, which leaves you anxiously aware that the author of your story seems to be wrapping up an awful lot of loose ends.

(This is essentially a joke but considering “TICHLOCH” sometimes I wonder.)

énouement n. the bittersweetness of having arrived here in the future, finally learning the answers to how things turned out but being unable to tell your past self.

(I’m a bit subject to fantasies about being able to go back to some point in life and start again with the information I have now. Silly, really.)

Here are two of his words that were less on-point for me:

ghough n. a hollow place in your psyche that can never be filled; a bottomless hunger for more food, more praise, more attention, more affection, more joy, more sex, more money, more hours of sunshine, more years of your life; a state of panic that everything good will be taken from you too early, which makes you want to swallow the world before it ends up swallowing you.

aoyaoia n. a musical flavor found in electric guitar solos that compels you to snarl, squint, and arch your spine like a yowling jungle cat.

The book is divided into chapters but their titles are vague (like “Between Living and Dreaming” and “Boats Against the Current”) and don’t seem like they are much related to the content a bit like some of the words themselves.

There is a thoughtful preoccupation with life’s significance, unpredictability, and how we sometimes feel bewildered and lost. Koenig seems to balance along some sort of an edge below which on one side is a sadness and sometimes fear or worry and on the other a coruscating delight of insight.

On the worrisome side we have:

Still, you can’t shake the feeling that something is missing.

How much of your time could be better spent trying to make a difference? Then again, what difference could you realistically hope to make? Perhaps you tell yourself it doesn’t matter as long as you do something—but wouldn’t that only prove you were doing it just for yourself, not for some greater cause? So where does that leave you?

and about other people

You have no way of knowing how insecure their footing might be, how malleable they really are. How many years of effort might’ve gone into shaping their persona into something acceptable. How many hands it takes just to get them through an ordinary day, and keep them from falling to pieces.

My impression from some of these passages was okay fine. But I briefly wondered how they would affect someone taking Obscure Sorrows seriously who was on the edge of depression or paranoia?

And then interposed:

true sadness is actually the opposite, an exuberant upwelling that reminds you how fleeting and mysterious and open-ended life can be.

about a joyful experience:

Savor it while it lasts—if only because it means that you care about something in this world enough to let it under your skin.

(You can find) some semblance of order to the wilderness inside your head, so you can settle it yourself on your own terms, without feeling too lost—safe in the knowledge that we’re all lost.

(T)here’s no such thing as “ordinary life.” … beneath our rules and quarrels, we’re stuck together on a wide-open planet where anything can happen, which leaves us no choice but to survive, to build a shelter, and find each other in the storm. Knowing that every passing day is very nearly miraculous, a cascading series of accidents that just happens to fall our way.

Considering how guileless and insouciant Koenig can be I guess it’s up to the reader to take any or all of his ideas seriously or just curiously intriguing. And for the most part they are intriguing. The dictionary package reminds me a bit of Fowler’s Modern English Usage. You can enjoy opening it anywhere because of the ironically authoritative tone of the various authors.

Reading over what I’ve written here I see I’ve assumed Koenig’s somewhat random and blithely irresponsible approach. Okay, here’s my opinion: I think you could do worse than spending some time with him. Like a lot of things, at best it’s thought-provoking and enjoyable, at worst you can easily just skip over it.

8.2/9.0