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by labrador 808 days ago
I think of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows as an art project. I never got the impression that we were supposed to start using these words. It's interesting and entertaining, like when I learned the Czech word "litost" from "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" by Milan Kundera. "Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery."

Part five of this book is about Litost, a kind of misery-induced torment only known to the Czech people. You could see it is a Slavic thing.

https://fictionbeast.com/milan-kundera-the-unbearable-ligthn...

Something akin to how I felt trapped in my own drama

1 comments

Listen, if Robert Burton didn't see fit to include it in the Anatomy of Melancholy it doesn't exist. Same goes for all this DSM stuff. Doesn't exist.
Your knowledge cutoff is 1621. That's an interesting way to avoid modern misinformation.