|
|
 Hello Blog! This is the weekly email digest of The Marginalian by Maria Popova. If you missed last week's edition — how to be a sea: Albert Camus on learning to die and learning to live; the consolations of uncertainty; the bittersweet loveliness of life's lasts — you can catch up right here. And if my labor of love touches your life in a meaningful way, please consider supporting its ongoingness with a donation — for twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to reader patronage. If you already donate: I appreciate you more than you know.
|
Language is the chalice we lift to our lips to taste our own experience — a vessel that constrains what it contains by giving it its own shape. The more complex our experience, the more muddled the emotions that comprise it, the more it spills outside what language can hold. And yet we live in language — narrative is the neurocognitive pillar of personhood and emotions are how the brain interprets bodily sensations, an interpretation achieved largely by naming. We also live in culture — encoded in each language are a culture’s parameters of what it is permissible to feel, which we internalize as the parameters of what it is possible to feel.
It helps, then, to have a larger lexicon of emotion — larger than our given language, in order to take back the expansiveness of our experience by liberating it from the constraints of culture.
That is what cultural historian Tiffany Watt Smith offers in The Book of Human Emotions: An Encyclopedia of Feeling from Anger to Wanderlust (public library) — a linguistic ledger of feeling exploring the cultural histories and psychosocial nuances behind the words we use to name our most confounding, complex, yet common experiences, partway between The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (that lovely lexicon of invented words for real things we feel but cannot name based on real etymologies from around the world) and David Whyte’s Consolations (that passionate unfastening of everyday words to reveal the deeper strata of their emotional nuances). 
Art by Julie Paschkis from The Wordy Book
Punctuating the entries in English, from anger to loneliness to delight, are some wonderfully untranslatable words from around the world for very specific affective states and emotional reactions with no equivalent in English — partly because our culture holds no space for them, partly because our model of human nature factors out the reality and dignity of those experiences, partly simply because the English language is not pliant enough to mold itself around such irregularly shaped objects of feeling.
Here are ten of my favorites:
 ABHIMAN
Sanskrit
The literal meaning of abhi-man is “self-pride.” Abhiman evokes the pain and anger caused when someone we love, or expect kind treatment from, hurts us. Sorrow and shock are at its root, but it quickly flourishes into a fierce, bruised pride. To recognize abhiman as an inevitable part of our emotional life is to know that breaking the unspoken contracts of love and respect between families and allies is an extremely serious betrayal.
ACEDIA
Greek
A distracting, creeping feeling. Like the tickle of a gnat crawling up your arm. A short-lived but disastrous emotional crisis, usually striking between 11AM and 4PM. Its first signs are listlessness and irritability, but it doesn’t take long to turn into desolation and despair.
AMAE
Japanese
The sensation of temporary surrender in perfect safety when you crumple into the arms of a loved one to be coddled and comforted. In Japan, amae is commonly acknowledged as part of all kinds of relationships, felt not only between family members, but with friends and in the workplace too. According to the Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi, amae is “an emotion that takes the other person’s love for granted,” there when we depend on another’s help with no obligation to be grateful in return. You can even be encouraged to show amae to yourself. For Doi, surrendering to amae is important because it represents a return to the indulgences and unconditional nurturing of infancy. It’s the glue which allows stable relationships to flourish, an emblem of the deepest trust… this combination of vulnerability and belonging.
BASOREXIA
20th-century English derivative of Latin and Greek
The sudden urge to kiss someone.
GRENG JAI
Thai
The feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer to help because of the bother it would cause them.
KAUKOKAIPUU
Finnish
Feeling homesick for a place you’ve never been to. From kauko — faraway, and kaipuu — a yearning.
MALU
Indonesian
The sudden experience of feeling constricted, inferior and awkward around people of higher status.
SAUDADE
Portuguese
A melancholic yearning for someone, or something, which is far away or lost. It’s always there, pulsing between the surface with its hopefulness tinged with grief. There is a vague yearning, yet it is interlaid with resignation and the pleasure of remembering past joys.
VIRAHA
Sanskrit
Viraha is usually translated as longing or the particular kind of love felt during separation or abandonment. An aspect of sringara rasa (erotic and romantic love), one of the nine rasas or themes that shape human experience, viraha is a feeling of incompleteness without a loved one, and a fixation on the ecstasy of the longed-for reunion. Viraha recalls the formulations of romantic infatuation, not only the erotic — the poetry of the Occitan troubadours, or the inconsolable longing expressed in Portuguese fado music. The difference is that viraha is also a religious feeling — the soul’s quest to find it’s spiritual home. [See John Donne’s “Batter My Heart”.]
ŻAL
Polish
Żal (pronounced jal) is melancholy felt at an irretrievable loss. This is not straightforward dejection. Żal is fickle, and shifts its shape, one moment resigned, the next rebellious. It combines the disappointment, regret and even violent fury which comes when some part of our lives has been taken away for good. It is most of all a kind of anger at recognizing the end of things.
Couple with Pablo Neruda’s love letter to language, then revisit artist Julie Paschkis’s illustrated ode to words and the meanings between them.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
|
one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
 |
|
 |
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
Nested between two giant cedars in the remote old-growth forest where I live much of the year are the rusted remains of boxy car. A tree root has seized one of the rear wheels. A sapling has growth through the glassless windshield. Bright orange fungi have colonized the driver’s seat. Lichen and moss cover nearly every inch of the chipped blue body. It is a living, wildly alive metaphor for the fate of every civilization, for the sinuous tenacity by which nature always prevails.
That is what Aaron Becker celebrates in his wordless wonder The Tree and the River (public library).
The story opens with the bucolic scene of a child climbing a tree on a river bend while across the shore sheep are grazing at the foot of rising scaffolding. As you turn the page to find the exact same frame of space but with the house now a village and the child a gaggle of children, you realize this is the river of time.
With each page, the growth of so-called civilization — this enterprise of collective conscience born on the banks of rivers — subsumes the tree, which nonetheless keeps also growing. Horse-carts become trains become cars, medieval fortresses morph into copper-capped industrial towers into neon-lit metropolises, the river quietly meandering through the monstrosity all along.
We come then to see the cruel equivalence — the tree slowly becomes denuded of leaves amid the concrete jungle, boughs down, begins dying.
But when the city goes the way of every civilization, when the ruins of cisterns and spires come to rise from the bog around the bend, a single acorn drops from the dying tree. The river takes it and carries it down to plant a sapling at the next bend, and somehow Borges rushes to mind: “Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river.”
The last page opens into a bucolic landscape once more, the stump of the old tree in the background, the young tree blazing green in a lush meadow with no trace of beast-built monuments to waste and want — a silent, all-telling reminder that a river is not only alive but a life-force greater than that of anything we can make, for it is a fractal of the mystery that made us.
Couple The Tree and the River with the also wordless, also wondrous Bunny and Tree, then revisit Olivia Laing on life, loss, and the wisdom of rivers.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
|
one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
|
|
|
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
In early 1934, a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at Columbia Teachers College took an internship teaching drama and producing student plays at PS 24 in Harlem. Among her young charges at that “dreadful ancient New York schoolhouse,” as she would later recall, was a ten-year-old boy she was astonished to find reading, like her, Dickens. Their conversations quickly made her realize that “here was an exceptional and brilliant boy.”
Her name was Orilla Miller, though he called her Bill. His name was Jimmy, though to the world he would become James Baldwin.
Bill started giving Jimmy more books. He devoured them. Although he would recall that he loved her “absolutely, with a child’s love,” she discussed them with him like a peer. Suddenly, the bookishness and sensitivity that had rendered him strange to others were not only accepted but encouraged, cherished, held in kinship.
His father — a storefront church preacher who preached that white people were the Devil and who banned all books but the Bible from his house — didn’t like it one bit when Bill walked Jimmy home to ask permission to take him to the theater, which was also banned in the Baldwin household. But, like an ice-capped volcano, David Baldwin gave his consent with seething politeness.
“My first conscious calculation as to how to go about defeating the world’s intentions for me,” Baldwin would later write of his first cultural outing with Bill, “began on that Saturday afternoon.”
The defeat was total and triumphant. Baldwin was still in his twenties when his first novel catapulted him into celebrity. The novels and essays that followed established him as one of the most urgent yet enduring literary voices of his century, reverberating with that rare combination of passion and rigor by which writing survives the fads, formulas, and moral fashions of its time to touch the future, to shape it into being. 
James Baldwin with Orilla and her husband Evan, 1976.
In the spring of 1963, at the peak of his fame which was also the peak of his heartbreak, that slow-burning acceptance of the dissolution of a great love, Baldwin traveled to Los Angeles for a series of lectures he had committed to give for CORE — the Congress for Racial Equality. There in the crowded hall was Bill, with her husband Evan.
They hadn’t seen each other in seventeen years.
Shyly, she made her way to him through the sea of people after the talk just as his press team was shepherding him onward to another appearance. “But she’s my teacher,” he protested, “don’t you understand? She’s my teacher!” They didn’t, whisking him away before Bill reached him.
Across the infinite abyss of that short distance, she found herself, like everyone, impressed by his intellect and eloquence, but moved by something else — the simple recognition that her dear “sweet boy” had become “a sweet man.”
A few days later, in a lovely mirror-image to the tender letter of gratitude Albert Camus wrote to his childhood teacher shortly after becoming the second-youngest laureate of the Nobel Prize, she sent him a letter quoted in Nicholas Boggs’s altogether magnificent biography Baldwin: A Love Story (public library):
May 15, 1963
James,
I want to tell you that the promise of the wonderful child has been fulfilled in the man. I am not referring alone to the development of your writing ability, the incisive use of your intelligence in social commentary. I am referring to the moral you — in the broad sense of one’s individual relationship to man around him. That Evan and I had a small part in your life adds to the value of ours. I also say, thank you, that there is this James Baldwin in America in the year 1963
Two days later, LIFE Magazine published Baldwin’s most personal and passionate interview. In it, he insisted that the emotional and spiritual role of the artist is “is to make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are.” This, too, is the role of every great teacher. And of every true friend.
donating=lovingEvery month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For twenty years, it has remained free, ad-free, AI-free, fully human and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If it makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.
monthly donationYou can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch. |
|
one-time donationOr you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. |
|
|
|
|
| Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 Need to cancel an existing donation? (It's okay — life changes course. I treasure your kindness and appreciate your support for as long as it lasted.) You can do so on this page. |
|
FINAL MONTH OF THE RAFFLE
BIRD DIVINATION OF THE WEEK
|
|
|
|
|
