In A Defence of Poetry, Shelley writes:

It is difficult to define pleasure in its highest sense; the definition involving a number of apparent paradoxes. For, from an inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature, the pain of the inferior is frequently connected with the pleasures of the superior portions of our being. Sorrow, terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good. Our sympathy in tragic fiction depends on this principle; tragedy delights by affording a shadow of that pleasure which exists in pain. This is the source also of the melancholy which is inseparable from the sweetest melody. The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.

"An inexplicable defect of harmony in the constitution of human nature" . . . this is the phrase that will linger with me today. What is this inexplicable defect? And why do we all, every one of us, suffer from it? I think of the poetry of Keats and Shelley, but also of Joe Bolton, but also of Shakespeare--of Hamlet, Othello, even The Winter's Tale--the pain, that is also pleasure, in reading of these sorrows; the pain, that is also pleasure, of writing about tragedy or even simple sadness.

Last week I told someone that I think the best lines I've ever written, thus far, appear in one of the eclogues in How the Crimes Happened:

. . . It's not that being here
is misery; it's more like marriage is too much
and not enough at the same time: the trees crowd us
like children, our bodies betray a fatal longing.

Every time I say those lines aloud at a reading, I feel the weight of being alive. If I never write anything else again, I should remember to be grateful that, somehow, the patterns of pleasure and pain aligned themselves in those words that, one day, fell from my fingers.