“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.

Most of us alive today will survive into old age, and although that is a welcome development, the price of experiencing more life is sometimes experiencing less of it, too. So many losses routinely precede the final one now: loss of memory, mobility, autonomy, physical strength, intellectual aptitude, a longtime home, the kind of identity derived

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.

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

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

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

Worse still, it is not just a wrong target that can draw our attention. Sometimes we home in on entirely the wrong search area. Your lost wallet might be lodged beneath the passenger seat of a friend’s car, not in your apartment; your lost hiker might have quit an hour into his trip and headed back to town or left the trail and gone for a swim. It

I sometimes yearned for more moments like that, moments when my sorrow ran through me like a river at night, dark and clear, untainted by any more insidious emotion. Yet such things aren’t responsive to our wishes. If we could summon sorrow, we could banish it, but the whole lesson grief teaches us is that we are not the ones in control.

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.