The desire to see memories in advance. The fear that you’ve lived an ordinary life. The mesmerizing nature of a nighttime drive.
The human experience is marked by these little awarenesses, oftentimes mixing up joy and melancholy, connection and isolation, longing and fullness.
These kinds of ideas sparked John Koenig’s ’06 “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows,” a multimedia project which invents new words to name seldom-felt solemn feelings — the kind of feelings that, were they not concretized in a dictionary entry, you might wonder if you were the only one to feel them.
Originally starting in 2009 as a blog, the YouTube channel belonging to the project released its first set of videos in October 2014 and the “Dictionary” became a print book in 2021. But the project has its origins in Koenig’s time at Macalester.
“It started right here; I was in the library,” Koenig said. “There’s one section in the back of the building where a lot of old books were, and I was trying to write a poem for one of my senior writing classes. And the title just sort of popped into my head, ‘the dictionary of obscure sorrows.’”
Perhaps the most well-known of Koenig’s words is ‘sonder,’ denoting the awareness that every passerby, though entirely anonymous to us, has a story just as rich and engrossing as the ones we live through in our own lives.
“[‘Sonder’] was weird because I almost didn’t post it,” Koenig recalled. “It was the middle of the night, I was stopped at a stoplight, and I see a progression of people turning left. And so you get this little parade of someone lost in their thoughts, or singing along to a song, or arguing with someone. Just a little glimpse in like two seconds of someone’s day. And I think that’s sort of the origin of it, just trying to pin down that word.”
‘Sonder’ has resonated enough that it seems to have shed the collective knowledge of its origin as a neologism — a word that was coined in modern times, rather than one that emerged through ‘natural’ language-change processes.
“[With] certain definitions going viral, I wonder the proportion of people who [use] ‘sonder,’ do they know it’s something that was just made up?” Koenig remarked.
It’s also a word that has received something of a popular reinterpretation; some take the fact that every passing face has a story behind it as a reaffirmation of the richness of everyday life.
“‘Sonder’ is interesting because a lot of people tell me, ‘why is that a sorrow? That’s just the richness of human culture and so many people I can meet out there,’” Koenig said. “[Others] feel it as kind of a joy. But for me, there’s definitely a sense that you’re missing out; these people might have been my best friend or could have been my soulmate, but I have to make peace with not having them and I have to dismiss them as just ‘man in coffee shop’ or whatever, and just let them be extras in my own story. I think there’s a certain loss there.”
That reinterpretation points to an inherent tension of the project: that Koenig’s words and reflections denote feelings more complex than ‘sorrow,’ as it’s typically understood. Koenig’s words are typically at least bittersweet, and can often be taken as joyful: ‘nyctous’ is the quiet elation of being alone as the last one awake in the middle of the night; ‘suerza’ is the amazement at having overcome tremendous odds to exist at all.
‘Sonder’ also encapsulates a key concern that reverberates throughout Koenig’s “Dictionary:” the inability to holistically grasp the world.
‘Onism’ is the word Koenig coined for that exact idea, but others — ’Astrophe,’ for the feeling of being stuck on Earth, ‘silience,’ for the artistry harbored by individuals all around us, ‘watashiato,’ for the wondering about the impact we’ve unknowingly had on the lives of others — revolve around the same theme.
It’s something Koenig, who studied English and sociology, draws back in part to his time at Macalester.
“That sort of bird’s-eye view of everything, I think, is really addictive,” Koenig said. “I definitely got my fill of that at Mac, but I think that affected how I think and how I look at the world. Just trying to find hidden commonalities in everything, hidden connections.”
Koenig’s international upbringing also informed his work, lending him the idea to fill those as-yet unnamed gaps in the English language.
“I grew up in Geneva, Switzerland, in an international school, surrounded by tons of different languages,” Koenig said. “[There,] you get a sense of what is possible with language beyond what you know. There’s all these [concepts in languages other than English] like ‘ubuntu’ or ‘saudade’ or ‘duende,’ or even ‘schadenfreude,’ where the minute you know it, it’s like a door opens in your head. So I was always aware of that tension, of how we can expand [language] artificially and take ownership over the language and the terms that we live our lives in.”
While the entries in the “Dictionary” are generally around one or two paragraphs, Koenig is aiming to take a deeper literary look into the aforementioned ‘sonder.’
“It’s the awareness that each random passerby is the center of their own universe, the protagonist of their own story,” Koenig said. “So I’m just trying to unpack, why it is we need to think of ourselves as the protagonist of our own story. Is it possible to live another way? Can we undo identity and just take the world as it is without sort of filtering it into that narrative that we seem so obsessed with? I’m trying to write a book about that, about ‘sonder,’ all the aspects of humanity that we miss in each other. Still trying to figure it out.”
Koenig’s “Dictionary” is a work-still-in-progress, full of novel definitions for emotions and awarenesses that cross the entire spectrum of human emotion, mixing up joys, sadnesses, fears, awes and fascinations. The complexity of those mixtures is both what has kept those feelings unnamed until now, and it’s what quite often makes them at once hyperspecific and widely poignant; college students at the tail end of the academic year will certainly recognize ‘etterath,’ the mixed relief and emptiness of having completed a great task.
Part of the impetus for Koenig’s “Dictionary” was the urge to express ideas that he felt might never have been felt by another individual. One might imagine that that’s a pretty lonely feeling. But, through “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” and its public reception, there comes a sort of self-fulfilling way out of that loneliness; lending names to those niche emotions, only to find thousands who resonate and who have felt the same way.
“The thing is, these are just things that, for all I know, only exist in my own head, so the idea that other people feel it too is astounding, because I consider myself a very neurotic, in some ways self-obsessed person, but I think everyone is kind of neurotic [and] self-obsessed these days,” Koenig remarked wryly. “But it’s been really gratifying. You know, no one is alone in whatever you happen to think or feel. Someone is out there, you just have to work to find people that you share it with.”
