Nothing could be less manipulative than the things that fill me with this tender, mournful feeling; they are best summed up as the world just being the world. And as for excess—well, how are we supposed to feel about the fact that we will eventually lose everything we love, including our own lives? In

Lately I have found this everyday remarkableness almost overwhelming. As I said, I’ve never been much for stoicism, but these last few years, I have been even more susceptible than usual to emotion—or, rather, to one emotion in particular. As far as I know, it has no name in our language, although it is close to what the Portuguese call saudade and

“Whoever supposes,” Montaigne once wrote, “to see me look sometimes coldly, sometimes lovingly, on my wife, that either look is feigned, is a fool.” We think of all these other emotions as supernumerary, as obscuring or even defiling the real thing. But there is no real thing—or, rather, taken together, this grab bag of reactions is the real thing.

In the math of the mind, in other words, the most powerful operation might be simple addition. “Connect the dots,” we tell people when we want them to understand something; comprehension emerges when we can see the links between things.

In short, we know that, as Philip Roth once put it, “Life is and.” He meant that we do not live, for the most part, in a world of either/or. We live with both at once, with many things at once—everything connected to its opposite, everything connected to everything.

We left the house together, choosing to walk to town for coffee rather than make it at home, and on the way up the little hill outside my front door I took her hand in mine. It was different, thrillingly so, from how we had touched the night before, more chaste yet also more definitive. Overnight, I had become someone who wanted to hold someone’s

Afterward, I led her back indoors. For a long time after that, everything that wasn’t her—the house around us, the rest of the world, the passage of time, the past and the future—retreated into unimportance.

Love, before we encounter it, is like an idea we’ve never had before. We may try to fumble our way toward it, but its eventual manifestation is a mystery. This is one of its many delights: love often takes us by surprise, in when and where it shows up and, above all, in who embodies it. But, from the perspective of those who are still searching for

It is something like a missing person—in fact, it is quite literally a missing person—but the search area in which we must look for it is essentially unbounded. It could be waiting at the local coffee shop, or three states away, or on staff at a hospital in Senegal, or at a holiday party you’re not very enthusiastic about attending, forty cold,