"“Why are you sad?” he asked. I don’t think I could answer him because he triggered something in me that touched deeply on that human sadness. The sadness of longing, and missing, and hoping and dreaming. He saw the deep wells of water in my eyes and asked me to write him a piece the following morning. “The Tears of Life. Tell me about the Tears of Life, Sophie.” So I did. Why am I sad?
“I am sad because there is poetry in most things. I am sad because nothing will stay, everything shall pass, and when it does, I have held onto it much too lovingly to let it go easily. I am sad because people show me such vivid joy, and then they too must pass away. I am sad because I cannot live alone. I am sad because everyone is alone. I am sad because we are all leaving, and we are all coming home too. I am sad because I miss my mother, and sometimes want to crawl back to the womb, to become unborn from this cruel, cold world.
Yet something keeps me from crawling, because the world is not cruel and it is not cold, we say. Even though we are tired and we are hungry, and we are hurting from the noise and the weight; the bearing weight of excruciation which looms over us like the hand of God, full of our own dreams – we go on – perhaps because our Mother did, and our Father did, and they too bore the weight of this world in order to give birth, to bring about new life, an experience, an experiment – you – some newer creature who would speak in tongues not heard on this planetary marble before. Each child is such a creature: Very New, and Very Old at the same time.
I am sad because of the way the light falls, because I recognize myself in everything, and want to devour life, and I do – the challenges bind and the triumphs release the straps that have woven ever tighter and tighter around the fist as we claw our way up through the foliage. I am sad because I am leaving, because I do not know how much I can do, and even if I do all I can, I do not know if it will be worth the striving. Are those vivid joys worth a world of challenge? It will always be enough, but is it worth giving myself – am I the price I pay for my joy?
I am sad because I know who I am, and yet it still changes, like the way an onion grows beneath ground, wrapping and wrapping itself around the bud, circling with more skins, more clothing, more layers to one day be revealed. And who will cook me? Who will pull me from the dirt and dissect me? Is it God, the cosmic force? Is it me?
I am sad because there IS joy in the world – and my heart aches in the struggle to come home, and also to leave. I am sad because I am angry too, angry that there is no knowing, angry that everyone suffers the same and that you could never shift the DNA to edit darkness from the light. I would never want to: I realize that I am sad because I have also been happy. It is the wide gaping chasm in my heart that was once filled with joy, that now fills with tears. My tears carve the sands of my interior, such that the vessel broadens, in order to bear the weight of my laughter.
This is why I am sad. The carousel turns. Joy fades like sunshine. But sadness is a stream that runs deep underground, in the dark hard granite of the soul’s ancient yearnings. I do not know what those yearnings are, but I keep looking, every minute, of every day. Perhaps that is what moves me most: That no matter how soft or how hardly you look, how intensely, how haphazardly, you will not know true freedom until you are released from physicality, out of matter and into the mind. This is another departure for me, and I am not willing to let go of all I have fallen in love with here on Earth, in order to seek this bliss, and find what it is I am looking for.
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Orhan Pamuk 1996
