This morning I had a virtual Rotary club meeting, where the themes of gift giving and grief somehow merged. This led me to share, in the chat, the Adrianne Lenker song “Sadness as a Gift” as something that bridges both sentiments. I have no idea if anyone read the comment or took the time to listen.

But as I took a look this evening at Montaigne’s first take on sadness. Lenker came to mind for me again. Her song includes one of the most beautiful lines I’ve heard sung: “You could hear the music inside my mind.” For someone like Lenker, losing someone with that superpower must be especially draining, which probably accounts for why she wrote three-years worth of heart-wrenching breakup songs.

There’s another aspect of that song that always affects me. In the chorus, Lenker first sings “we can see the sadness as a gift but still feel too heavy to hold.” She only completes the line in the first verse. In the second and third verses, she shortens it to “we can see the sadness as a gift but still …”

It’s in the absence where the words become more powerful, because we know what Adrianne is withholding. If she had given us the shortened version in the first and second verses and concluded with the full line in the third, it would feel like resolution and found wisdom. But she’s not interested in giving us comfort, she wants us to feel her loss fully.

It all relates to Nietzsche’s quote — perhaps my favorite — that in all talk there is a grain of contempt. We lack the vocabulary to express our deepest, most personal feelings. And Adrianne found a way around that — withholding, creating an empty space for us to feel her expression and take it even farther.

Montaigne did something similar in his second essay. He tells us over and again how he is not affected by sadness, that he’s of tough character and refuses to wallow in self pity. But he juxtaposes his quotes that hint of the opposite, of the fact that any love that can be expressed burns on a small pyre and, quoting his favorite poet Virgil, how grief finds a voice for our sorrows.

We will discover later in book one that he was, in fact, mourning the death of his best friend and was putting on a brave face to deny it. The fought back tears gives them greater weight.

Ok, so I’ve written of Lenker and Montaigne, are you now to expect me to share some deep grief or sorrow that I’m carrying around? Am I withholding or putting on a brave face by focusing on others? Perhaps you shouldn’t believe my answer, given how I interrogated Adrianne and Michel.

Believe what you will, but I am not carrying around any sorrow these days. I mourn nothing about my life, not passing days nor people once close who have faded away. My stance at this moment is that it’s a small miracle that any of us have lived at all. What a bizarre, unlikely narrative it is that brought chains of people together and passed existence through bodily fluids and fertilized eggs, with people existing on farms and surviving famines and wars, and it all continuing down to you and perhaps beyond.

And that we continue to live is the great discontinuity in the scheme of existence that spans billions of years and spreads beyond our view in every possible direction. Somehow we made it and somehow again, we’re still here and we continue to live and fail and experience disappointments, but somehow we go on and learn and continue to have chances to do something new — or not, if we choose the happiness of just continuing.

So yes, sadness is a gift because it’s all a gift. And none of us matter in the scheme of this vast, cold, inexplicable universe and yet we somehow cast a ripple in it as well. How strange and wonderful that is.