Sonder, Sontag, and the Simultaneity of Everything

When I am blocked creatively, I often search Google, Pinterest, or Instagram for inspiration and insight into the world around me. This always helps me to get "unstuck" and seems to better inform my writing. Several years ago I stumbled upon the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Created by John Koenig, the site is dedicated to inventing words (neologisms) to describe the emotions that we all feel but don't have a word in the English language that defines them. Each original word and its definition aims to fill a gap in the English language and although the words are made-up, they are carefully crafted using proper etymology. A self-proclaimed lexophile, I have found DOS to be word porn at its best.

How does a word become a word anyway? Lexicographer Erin McKean says, "Anybody who's read a children's book knows that love makes things real." (The Velveteen Rabbit, anyone?) "If you love a word, use it —that makes it real. Being in the dictionary is an arbitrary distinction; it doesn't make a word more real than in any other way. If you love a word, it becomes real."

Most recently, I fell in love with the word sonder, a neologism invented by John Koenig in 2012 whose etymology is related to both the German sonder (special) and the French sonder (to probe).

SONDER - n., the realization that each random passerby is living a life as rich, vivid, & complex as your own - populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries, and inherited craziness - an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you'll never know exited, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

It is something I have pondered at random moments in my life: shopping at the mall, on the subway in NYC, walking along the ocean on a crowded beach, etc. I experienced sonder most recently at the Nashville International Airport while I was waiting to get on a flight that had been delayed for several hours. As I waited, I watched other travelers —some in a hurry, some not in a hurry, mothers towing small children, one traveler stopping to buy a magazine at the news kiosk, a man in business attire drinking a martini at the airport bar across the way- and I wondered where they were going, what they were thinking, who they were going to see, who they might be leaving behind. Were they running away from a life they hated, headed off to explore new places, excited, nervous, scared? I realized that I would never understand the complexity of their lives.

Not to sound cliche, but people are like icebergs. We can only see what sits above the surface; those characteristics they choose to project. We might look at the way a person dresses, the manner in which they carry themselves, the color of their hair, the look in their eyes and assign them a label based on some arbitrary aspect of their outward appearance. A man in a suit carrying a briefcase is a businessman, a woman dressed in rags pushing a shopping cart down the street is a bag lady, an elderly woman holding the hand of a small child is a grandparent. But under the surface of every individual being we encounter is an entire epic story with layers and layers of narrative, plot twists, and connections to other lives whose existence we are completely unaware.

Everyone is the protagonist in their own story and everyone's story is complete with its own cast of major and minor characters —the sidekick, the antagonist, the mentor, the skeptic, as well as an infinite number of extras, those people we hardly notice in the hustle of daily life: the old man reading the newspaper on a park bench, the young woman hailing a cab, the girl sipping coffee on a street corner waiting to cross the street.

The late playwright, author, and essayist, Susan Sontag seemed to understand the concept of sonder, not only in real life but also as it applies to writing. According to Sontag:

"To tell a story is to say: this is the important story. It is to reduce the spread and simultaneity of everything to something linear, a path."

In narrative writing, simultaneity refers to two or more events or actions (physical, mental, or verbal) that exist at the same time and the relation of those events to each other.

How does a writer deal with simultaneity? Sontag says:

"Every writer of fiction wants to tell many stories, but we know that we can't tell all the stories — certainly not simultaneously. We know we must pick one story, well, one central story; we have to be selective. The art of the writer is to find as much as one can in that story, in that sequence…in that time (the timeline of the story), in that space (the concrete geography of the story)."

She goes on to say:

"A novelist, then, is someone who takes you on a journey. Through space. Through time. A novelist leads the reader over a gap, makes something go where it was not…

Time exists in order that everything doesn't happen all at once… and space exists so that it doesn't all happen to you."

Every novel has borders, and as Sontag notes:

"For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those borders."

The borders of the novel are the borders in which the story resides. Similarly, our individual lives have borders. Each of us is given one life and within the borders of that life, reside all the experiences that inform our worldview. Sometimes, it may seem that our story is the most important story - we are always the protagonist in our own life, walking along our own path oblivious to the simultaneity of everything.

We understand our own borders; it is those borders that allow us to make sense of the world around us. It is those borders in which our own experiences reside. While we may share the exact same experience with another person, each person will experience the same event differently - from their own unique perspective and set of experiences. This is what gives our lives completeness, unity, and coherence - everything we experience is relevant to the journey we take within the borders of our own lives.

Many authors have experienced great success writing parallel novels and reimagined classics that explore the perspectives of lesser characters in other works of fiction - Margaret Atwood (The Penelopiad), Gregory Maguire (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), and Geraldine Brooks (March), to name a few. They have stopped to ponder the lives of other characters —some minor, some flat, some round, some central to the plot of the original story —not just the characters whose story the original author deemed the important one to tell. In doing so, they have expanded on the linear and explored the simultaneity of the world in which the characters exist.

The question remains: How often do we really stop and think about the lives of others? First impressions are everything and we tend to pass judgment without ever stopping to consider the unique intricacies and complexities of each individual life. Sontag says that "the nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention - a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits but whose limits can be stretched. But perhaps the beginning of wisdom and humility is to acknowledge, and bow one's head, before the thought, the devastating thought, of the simultaneity of everything, and the incapacity of our moral understanding —which is also the understanding of the novelist - to take this in."

Just as every random passerby is living a life as "rich, vivid, and complex as our own" that we will never fully comprehend; every character in a story can be said to have their own "ambitions, friends, daily routines, worries, and inherited craziness" that the author may or may not choose to reveal. Like us, the protagonist of the story can choose to pay attention or to absorb themselves in their own story.

The reality in both works of fiction and in life is that most of us are so preoccupied with our own story, we fail to notice or even give thought to the plight of those around us and it is those lesser characters who may just have the most important story to tell.