Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, …
This is not a book about sadness -- at least, not in the modern sense of the word. The word sadness originally meant "fullness," from the same Latin root, satis, that also gave us sated and satisfaction. Not so long ago, to be sad meant you were filled to the brim with some intensity of experience. It wasn't just a malfunction in the joy machine. It was a state of awareness -- setting focus to infinity and taking it all in, joy and grief all at once.
— The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig (Page xii)
More than anything, this sentence in the foreword describes the contents of the book. They're word creations for -- as the title says -- obscure sorrows (or experiences), that are melancholy because they reach for the infinite, the entirety of the human condition, though they describe only a small fraction of it.
