Bittersweet summary

It’s May 27, 1992, and Sarajevo, a city in former Yugoslavia, is under siege. There are gunfights in the streets and mortar shells falling from the sky. Amid the chaos, Sarajevo’s citizens still need to perform the mundane tasks necessary to stay alive – like lining up outside the bakery in a downtown marketplace to buy bread. Most days these citizens return home safe, carrying loaves under their arms. Other days they might not be so lucky. On this particular day, a mortar attack kills 22 of the people waiting in line.

The next day, the scene outside the bakery is bleak. Then, a man in a tuxedo arrives, finds a place in the rubble to set up a plastic chair, sits down, and begins to play Albinoni’s Adagio in G minor on his cello. The man is Vedran Smailović who, in times of peace, is a cellist for the Sarajevo Opera. He will play outside the bakery, as shells fall in the streets around him, for 22 days – one day for every life lost. 

The sweetness of Smailović’s song doesn’t soften the bitter scene. And the desolation of the ruined city doesn’t detract from the beauty of his playing. Instead, pain and beauty combine to throw each other into even sharper relief. 

This is the bittersweet, where painful and joyful feelings harmonize rather than clash. 

Across generations and cultures, humans have long intuited that bitterness and sweetness, joy and sorrow are intrinsically intertwined. There are, in every life, “Days of honey, days of onion” as one Arabic saying goes. We can find pleasure in these intermingled emotions. 

In Japan, festivals are held when the sakura, or cherry blossoms, bloom. Picnics are held under pink, fragrant boughs of cherry blossom trees each spring. There are other spring blossoms that are equally lovely, but the Japanese prize sakura most of all because they have the shortest season. Celebrating these ephemeral blossoms elicits a feeling they call mono no aware – which, roughly translated, means “a gentle sorrow connected to the knowledge that everything is impermanent.” 

We are drawn to the bittersweet in music, too. Not everyone favors bittersweet songs over catchy pop melodies. But, as one study from the University of Michigan found, people whose favorite song is happy tend to listen to it 175 times on average. People whose favorite song is bittersweet, on the other hand, listen to that song roughly 800 times. 

Why do we respond so viscerally to expressions of the bittersweet? Well, this reaction might be hardwired into us. While the strength of it varies from person to person, humans all share something called the compassion instinct. Our compassion is prompted when we observe others suffering or experiencing pain. Our instinct to act compassionately toward each other is just as primal as our instinct to eat when we are hungry or seek warmth when we feel cold. In our earliest days on Earth, our survival as a species depended on this instinct to protect and care for others. 

In this sense, sadness – the bitter in the bittersweet – has an important evolutionary function. As psychologist Dacher Keltner puts it, “Sadness is about caring.” Paying attention to the sadness of others helps us build community and grow connections. Paying attention to our own sadness allows us to experience life in all its richness and complexity.

And yet, in the West, people tend to live in cultures that don’t honor bitterness. Popular psychology focuses on progress and positivity. Grief is framed as something which can be moved through in seven steps and then left behind. Trauma is something that needs closure. As a result, our experience of the bittersweet is diminished.

Perhaps it's time we opened ourselves up to the bittersweet and all the possibilities it holds. The bittersweet recognizes there is a place for joy in sadness, and that beauty is tinged with pain.