The title of this entry is the definition of the Portuguese word saudade, evidently considered one of the hardest words to translate. It’s one of my favorite ways to feel, because that faint hope of something lost which “might return in a distant future” is how I view all unpleasant finalities. From the referenced wikipedia article:
Some specialists say the word may have originated during the Great Portuguese Discoveries, giving meaning to the sadness felt about those who departed on journeys to unknown seas and disappeared in shipwrecks, died in battle, or simply never returned […] The state of mind has subsequently become a “Portuguese way of life”: a constant feeling of absence, the sadness of something that’s missing, wishful longing for completeness or wholeness and the yearning for the return of that now gone, a desire for presence as opposed to absence—as it is said in Portuguese, a strong desire to “matar as saudades” (lit. “to kill the saudades“).
I’ll be a bit indulgent here (it’s my blog, I’m allowed). I love the word because it neatly encapsulates my view of so much loss. Death (I’m sorry you didn’t get my letter in time, A.—I think you have it now. Thanks again for the books, rest well, and keep an eye out for my cat, if you don’t mind), lost youth (the perfect functioning, natural comfort and ease of use we have in our bodies when we’re children), disillusionment (everyone likes me and the world is my friend!), and about a thousand other things I can see in the shadows but can’t call out by name at the moment. And I don’t feel like waving a flashlight around, I’ve only had one cup of coffee today.
And now for the mundane part of this entry to drag it down from the unbearably romantic to the stolidly ubiquitous. I was re-loading my MP3 player (link goes to the SanDisk e260, highly recommended despite the occasional weird firmware issue and reboot bugs, see this site if you have any kind of MP3 player) by crawling through my music files one at a time (using Winamp, also highly recommended), determining what makes the cut and what doesn’t, finding some temporarily forgotten favorites and some things I can’t believe I ever bothered to download. Er, buy. Ha ha. Right-click, remove, physically remove selected item(s), yes. I think some smart ass P2P user uploaded a lot of shit to my computer, because I seriously would never have downloaded Barbie Girl, for instance. Even as a joke. Or a Gregorian Chant version of Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. Actually, maybe that one was me.
I found an old song by Love & Rockets (is all this linking getting annoying yet?) called, as you may have guessed by now, Saudade, which I probably first heard when I was fifteen or sixteen, hanging out with Ken (I’d link here too, but he’d kill me) in his room or driving back from Tower in DC, listening to music, smoking cigarettes down to the filter (and probably drinking to excess). Can’t say I’ve got much saudade for smoking or driving around drunk (O, the things we do when we are still immortal), but I definitely wouldn’t mind being sixteen again if for no other reason than to hear certain songs for the first time. And OK, maybe I do have a sense of fond longing for the distant-future return of driving around drunk, at least.
Recent events alluded to in the first paragraph inspire a strong sense of saudade, and though the word may be impossible to translate, I think I’ve got a native speaker’s grasp of it. The wikipedia article goes on to say:
The same feeling is also found in Brazil, the destination of immigrants who never saw their homelands again. The feeling was so much ingrained into the Brazilian mind that virtually every immigrant settled there learned this notion and incorporated it (even people from radically different mindsets, like German and Japanese immigrants to Brazil, soon understood it). Another permanent source of saudades for Brazilians is the vastness of the country itself, still mostly jungle, which in the past caused people to feel alone almost everywhere.
Being the progeny of Irish immigrants, I can connect to that at least culturally, as the Irish seem to have a similar sense of “forlorn longing for homeland” embedded somewhere in a genetic sequence or two. There’s a great line from a Pogues song: “Wherever we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees,” and I’ve definitely seen that in my own third-generation, never been to Ireland, don’t know the first thing about Irish history (outside of the Famine and the Troubles) immediate family. Hell, we even celebrate the tiny coal mining town my father left, in search of work in the late forties when the mines were shutting down. My grandfather died of black lung. Some things don’t deserve celebration.
Oh, the song made the cut (even though it hasn’t particularly traveled well) at 3.87 gigs out of a possible 5.59. I’ve got 1.72 more gigs of music to choose, then the audio books and lectures for the two gig flash card, so it’s time for more coffee and less romantic moaning.
