The Greeks Had a Word For It Read online

  There is no English equivalent even though the word describes a state of mind that is more common than we would like to believe. Perhaps we need the word in the language, if only to do our best to avoid the emotion it describes.

  Fernweh

  (German)

  The longing, or need, to be far away – anywhere else

  IT WAS A long way from home, but there was no doubting his accent. The young man behind the bar in Auckland looked every inch a Kiwi, with his tattooed arms and his All Blacks T-shirt, but his voice said ‘West Midlands’. So we exchanged a couple of words as he drew my pint.

  ‘Gap year?’ I asked, and he paused for a moment. There was a long, slow grin, and he raised one eyebrow quizzically.

  ‘Gap life, with a bit of luck,’ he replied.

  The old idea of a gap year as a character-forming break between school and university or between university and the world of work has changed. Now there are sixty-somethings setting off around the world, selling their homes or blowing their pension funds to pay for the journey. And among the youngsters who still make up the vast majority, one year often isn’t enough. More and more of them, unenthused by the idea of returning home to fight for insecure jobs in an economy that doesn’t seem to want them, are thinking rather of two years, or even more. ‘Gap life, with a bit of luck.’

  At a time like this we need a word like Fernweh (FAIRN-vee).

  It’s a German word that goes back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, and it translates literally as ‘far-sickness’ – the opposite of Heimweh, or ‘home-sickness’. It’s a desire to travel – not to anywhere in particular, but just to get away, to leave your familiar surroundings and hit the open road. It might last a few months or a few years, or it might consume the rest of your life, but you know that the only way to find yourself is to find new places, new horizons, new experiences. It could describe the feelings of those young and old gap-lifers alike.

  Except that there is a darker side to Fernweh. The vast majority of travellers set off with a song in their hearts, a joyful wish to get to wherever it is they are going and then perhaps move on again. They are motivated primarily by an optimistic wish to see what the world has to offer. For them, the more familiar wander-lust (another word originally from Germany) might be adequate – as it is for many English translators searching for a suitable rendition of Fernweh.

  It might last a few months or it might consume the rest of your life.

  The word Fernweh was infused with the spirit of the German Romanticism of the early nineteenth century – and, like many of the Romantics themselves, it had a bleak, obsessive edge to it. Without travel, a person who experienced Fernweh would feel an overwhelming lassitude, a sadness, a sense of depression that could all too easily develop into a suicidal longing for the last long journey of all. The difference between wanderlust and Fernweh is the difference between enjoying a few convivial drinks with your friends and drinking alone, long into the night, because you have to.

  Dadirri

  (Ngangikurungkurr, Australia)

  Contemplation of one’s place in the world, involving wonder and humility

  THE MANY LANGUAGES of the Australian Aboriginals are particularly rich in their evocation of the sounds, smells, sights and textures of the natural world, and it’s easy to see why. Throughout their 40,000-year history, the Aboriginal peoples have lived in close proximity to the land, and their very survival has depended on their ability to distinguish between one tree and another, to read the likely weather from particular cloud formations, or to recognize specific sounds in the Australian bush.

  Many of the Aboriginal languages have no single word for ‘tree’, but only words for each particular kind of tree; several have words for the smell of rain (nyimpe in Arrernte, spoken around Alice Springs, or panti wiru in Pitjantjatjara, spoken in Central Australia). They contain a vast repository of practical knowledge about the pharmaceutical and nutritional properties of Australian plants and animals.

  But a single word that draws together much of this affinity with the natural world is dadirri, from the Ngangikurungkurr language spoken in Australia’s Northern Territory. It’s generally translated into English as ‘contemplation’, but it has a much richer and more spiritual meaning than that. Another translation is ‘deep listening’, which catches more of the sense of quiet, stillness and attention that the word suggests.

  However, it goes far beyond simply listening to the natural world. Dadirri might describe the rapt attention paid to the ancient sacred stories about the tribe that have been told or sung for hundreds or thousands of years around a succession of campfires. It might be inspired by the ritual music and dancing of a corroboree, at tribal smoking ceremonies, or by the haunting music of the didgeridoo. In that sense – an awareness of the history and culture of the tribe – it can be felt both as the listener and the performer.

  Dadirri implies a sense of wonder and humility, an almost mystical awareness of one’s individual place in the great mystery of Creation. It focuses attention on both the vastness of the external worlds of time and space, and on the inner thoughts and emotions of the individual as a part of that greater whole.

  It is not hard to see why this mystic combination of humility and self-awareness was taken up by Christian churches in the centuries since European explorers arrived in Australia, nor how the identification of the individual with the natural world is relevant to more recent concerns about sustainability and environmental awareness.

  There is a growing belief in many English-speaking societies in the benefits of mindfulness, an awareness of the present moment, of your own thoughts and feelings, and of the world around you. Doctors, counsellors, coaches and the NHS recommend it as a way of combatting stress and improving mental well-being.

  How much better to be aware of oneself not just in the present moment but in the context of hundreds or thousands of years of history. Several Aboriginal writers and thinkers have suggested that dadirri could be the gift of their peoples to modern Australia – an idea and a word whose time has come.12

  Dépaysé

  (French)

  Feeling lost, like a fish out of water

  SIR JOHN SEELEY was a Victorian historian who famously observed that the British, in establishing their empire, seemed ‘to have conquered half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. If that’s true, then the English-speaking world is composed largely of the descendants of stout-hearted adventurers who sailed round the globe seizing territory without even noticing it. Not, then, people who are happiest in their own back garden and feel uneasy anywhere that you need a passport to get to.

  And yet, if you search for a word in English to describe the feeling of not knowing quite where you are, not feeling at home, not recognizing your surroundings, you would probably come up with ‘disoriented’. ‘Bewildered’ or ‘confused’ might do instead, or maybe ‘befuddled’. All of which suggest an uncomfortable, nervous feeling.

  You might think the language that contains these words is one spoken by people who would rather be safe at home, thank you very much, sitting by the fire in that comfy old cardigan with the holes in the elbows, watching Strictly Come Dancing while clutching a nice warm cup of hot chocolate – certainly not by the bold and buccaneering descendants of Francis Drake, Captain Cook, or the heroes of the East India Company.

  The French have a similar expression, dépaysé (deh-pay-SAY), which also means lost, or like a fish out of water. Pays means country, so the word literally means ‘taken out of your country’. But here is the unexpected and, for an English speaker, slightly shaming part: dépaysé also has the meaning of feeling disoriented but loving every minute of it. If you are dépaysé by a holiday, for instance, it has brought you a change of scenery, reinvigorated you and given you a new lease of life. While the poor old English speaker is still blinking around anxiously for something familiar, like a child looking for his teddy bear, the Frenchman is breathing in the air of freedom, gazing out impatiently at
fresh new pastures and relishing the mystery of what might lie over the horizon.

  The excitement of renewal, the relishing of fresh experiences, the idea of a new beginning?

  And it goes further than that. The verb se dépayser (suh DEH-pay-say) literally means ‘to exile yourself, to remove yourself from your own country’, but it also has the sense of stepping outside yourself, looking at your surroundings with fresh eyes. It’s a positive view of unfamiliarity, an acceptance of the fact that living exclusively with what you’re used to can have the effect of dulling your senses and quenching your ambitions. There’s a similar verb in French, se débrouiller (suh day-BROO-i-yay), which has a literal meaning of de-fogging yourself, shaking off the mental baggage that you carry with you and making a new start.

  Should we embrace a word to describe a feeling that is shared with the whole of humanity – the excitement of renewal, the relishing of fresh experiences, the idea of a new beginning? Or are we the sort of people who take Marmite and marmalade on holiday with us and want English pubs and fish and chips on the Costa Brava – people who have no time for these fancy foreign ideas?

  THE GREAT OUTDOORS

  Komorebi

  (Japanese)

  The magical atmosphere created by sunlight filtering through leaves

  IT’S A SPECTACLE that’s hard to forget.

  The Canal du Midi, cutting through 150 miles of southern France and linking the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean, is an engineering wonder of the seventeenth century. Its creator, Pierre-Paul Riquet, kept around twelve thousand workers on the job with picks and shovels for fifteen years. But it’s not the history, or the technological marvels, or even the human triumphs that remain with the traveller – just the staggering, overwhelming beauty of the place.

  Sailing through it, the water ahead of the boat is glassy-still, so the reflection of the weathered old stone bridge forms a complete circle, in which it is hard to see where the stone ends and the water begins. The boat noses softly through this magic circle to the other side as if it were a scene from Alice Through the Looking Glass. And the silent lines of plane trees, planted for the practical purpose of holding the soil of the banks together, filter the harsh southern sun into a stippled, shivering carpet of light and shadow.

  It is one of the most beautiful sights many visitors have ever seen. And there is a Japanese word that describes it exactly.

  Komorebi (KOH-MOH-REHB-i) is made up of a group of characters which individually signify trees, escape and sunlight, and it’s usually translated – or rather described – as sunlight filtering through the leaves. For a simple translation we might try dappled shade, but once you’ve seen this particular light, you’ll realize how inadequate that is.

  For a start, it looks at that magical, shimmering atmosphere from a slightly pedestrian angle – at the shade rather than at the light. And, even worse, it concentrates on the pattern on the ground rather than on the quality of the light itself. The Japanese, on the other hand, see the shafts of sunlight shifting and dancing as the leaves move – light escaping from the trees, as the word puts it. Komorebi is neither light nor shade, neither sky nor earth, neither movement nor stillness, but the delicate interplay between all of them.

  That awareness of light and its subtle creation of atmosphere is a quintessential aspect of the appreciation of nature among the Japanese. A Japanese garden will be a flickering patchwork of light and shade, not just a collection of neatly labelled plants. Komorebi provides a gentle, understated hint of the characteristic way in which the Japanese see the beauty of the world about them.

  But it’s not only the light, the shifting colours and the delicacy of the scene that komorebi celebrates, it’s also a beauty of almost unimaginable fragility. The smallest cloud across the sun, a wind any stronger than a light breeze that moves the branches about too violently, and it vanishes as if it had never been there.

  And, in that sense, the word applies exactly to the beauty of the Canal du Midi, too. For all Riquet’s engineering genius, the canal has proved to be fragile. Along great stretches of the banks, the plane trees that helped to produce that shimmering light are gone, cut down to try to protect the rest from the ravages of an infectious, incurable fungus. Rough-cut stumps line the water’s edge like rotten teeth, and the harsh sun beats down without any trembling leaves to lessen its glare. All that is left is the memory of komorebi.

  Dreich

  (Scots)

  Endlessly wet and dreary weather

  SCOTLAND HAS PROVIDED many valued benefits to the world, ranging from porridge to penicillin, Scotch whisky to the steam engine, tarmac to the telephone. Given that the wettest place in the whole of Europe is Scotland’s western Highlands, it is not surprising that they have also given us the most memorable and evocative word to describe persistently dull, wet, cold, dreary and unforgiving weather.

  Dreich (DREECH, with the final ch pronounced as in loch) is an ancient word. Scandinavian in origin, it originally meant tedious or protracted, like a job that drags on and on, a book that doesn’t know when to end, or a long and boring sermon. The novelist and poet George Macdonald referred in the late nineteenth century to ‘The kirk, whan the minister’s dreich and dry.’13 He was a minister himself, so he presumably knew what he was talking about. This sense of delay, or an unwillingness to get to a conclusion, led to another phrase, dreich in drawin’, which could be applied to someone who seemed to be taking an unreasonable time to make a decision – a suitor, in particular, who showed no sign of wanting to get married.

  That meaning of apparent endlessness is still there in the word dreich when it is used about the weather – the thing about a dreich day, apart from the cold, the sunlessness and the miserable, soaking drizzle, is that it seems as if it’s never going to end. To call it particularly Scottish weather might be a gross libel on a country which, whatever the statistics say, has palm trees growing on the Ayrshire coast, but it remains a favourite word for Scottish poets describing the place where they live. Alexander Gray, for instance, in his poem ‘December Gloaming’,14 writes movingly of the gloominess of the shortening days as the year draws to a close and the cold dreich winter days when night is falling at four in the afternoon. And a recent poll to establish the Scottish nation’s favourite home-grown word resulted in a runaway victory for dreich, with nearly a quarter of the total votes cast.

  What makes it especially attractive is its onomatopoeic quality – its long-drawn-out vowel sound, followed by the back-of-the-throat ch, as in loch or Auchtermuchty, seems to echo a yeeuch of disgust and resignation – two words which, in regard to the weather at least, demonstrate how much the Scots and English have in common. And yet dreich was lost to standard English centuries ago. That’s odd, given that one of the distinguishing traits of the Anglo-Saxon peoples is their ability to talk so long, so passionately and so tediously about the weather. Maybe it’s because the English, unlike the more realistic Scots, tend to cling even on the dullest days to an unreasonably optimistic belief that there is a tiny patch of blue sky and it’ll brighten up yet.

  It seems as if it’s never going to end.

  Perhaps dreich is a word that Scots can safely use about Scotland, but the English had better not. And to tread even more dangerous territory as to whether dreich might relate to anything deeply rooted in the Scottish character is a subject for a braver book than this one. However, it’s worth remembering P. G. Wodehouse’s assertion that ‘It is never difficult to distinguish between a Scotsman with a grievance and a ray of sunshine.’15

  Hozh’q

  (Navajo)

  A deep, wholehearted appreciation of the beauty of the world

  WE LIKE TO say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and when we do we may think that we have said something profound. But we don’t really believe the words – after all, we read books of critical theory and listen to experts telling us what is a good painting or a fine poem. So perhaps it would be truer to say that, for most people, beauty
is what’s put in the eye of the beholder. Once we start to unpick the sentence, we can begin to see how unsatisfactory it really is.

  The eye, marvellous as it is, sees only the surface of things. But what if we think of beauty as a quality that we not only see with our eyes but also experience deep within our souls? Does it affect our lives? Can it change our view of the world, transform us into different people?

  The Navajo of the south-western United States would answer all these questions with an unqualified ‘Yes’. Their word hozh’q (HOH-shkuh) describes the way that the beauty of the external world is seen and appreciated by each individual for himself, not only in his eyes but in his heart. It is no less than a guide for living a fulfilling life. It is an ideal – but an attainable ideal. Beauty, it says, is an essentially subjective and personal concept, and in finding it and experiencing it in both heart and soul, an individual learns what is important to him or her.

  The nineteenth-century artist, designer, poet and novelist William Morris offered a golden rule: ‘Have nothing in your life that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.’16 The Navajo of his day might not have accepted the distinction between what is useful and what is beautiful, but, in the unlikely event that they ever heard what Morris said, they would have understood his advice. Hozh’q would remove from life the search for wealth, material goods and social advancement, and replace it with a deep, wholehearted and transformational appreciation of the beauty of the world.

  The beauty of the external world is appreciated not only in his eyes but in his heart.