Is That the Same as Empathy?

Why do we sometimes welcome sorrow when the rest of the time we will quite naturally do anything to avoid it? There's actually a scholarly debate raging over this question, but I have come to believe that really what we are craving at bottom is that state of longing. It's because of longing that we play Moonlight Sonatas and build rockets to Mars,. And it's because we're all in this same, strange state of exile that we have the capacity to emphasize with each other in the first place.