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.