THEthe sense of loss we feel at the end of a good book, when the cover closes on the lives of characters we now know well. But also the caressing sound of a dishwasher running, or that “maternal and constant ssh”. Finally, desire to deviate from career tracks to seek a simple life become a shepherdess, look after a lighthouse on an atoll or take care of a farm – which is nothing more than “a useful diversion for our thoughts to take a break and return to the usual city cubicles”.
You call them if you want emotions
Here, we need to know at least a couple of things about these three precise sensations. A: it’s not just us who try them (and maybe we knew it). Two: there is no word with which to indicate them and be able to talk about them, understand each other quickly, feel understood. The limits of our language – Wittgenstein said – are those of our world: without words, therefore, we go nowhere. Very right. Yet there is more: the language we use is the one learned from the cradle onwards but it is not fixed, it is not linked to a precise order of ideas. And so if the words don’t exist, just invent them.
Why? Let’s think about it for a moment: how much would it calm us to know that there is a term that contains our world? Much. And in fact now there exists looseleft (from looseleaf, i.e. the detachable sheet of paper, + left, left), i.e. everything we feel at the end of reading. But also the platarasa (from the Latin plata, flat, + rasa, empty or clean) induced by the dishwasher. And the trumspringa of someone who would like to change his life and work (from the German Stadtzentrum, city center, + the Pennsylvania term rumspringa, “hopping here and there”, (i.e. the tradition among the Amish whereby teenagers do a quick immersion in modernity before choose whether to remain in the community).
They exist because someone invented them and when a precise emotion has its own word, we are entitled to feel it: does this sound to you? This someone is John Koenig, a writer based in Minneapolis with a wife, daughter and a very deep conviction: if there are thousands of terms to identify the different species of finches or the various types of schooners, the vocabulary we have to immortalize the wonderful subtleties of human experience is – in comparison – paltry. Archaic. That was basically enough for him mix terms from various languages to give shape (and life) to looseleft, platarasa, trumspringa, and many others.
Inventing words to describe emotions, our emotions (Getty)
The words to say it
With the aim of bridging the gap Koenig began to catalog them by inventing neologisms first on a blog, then on Youtube and now in Dictionary of nameless sadness (Mondadori), a book that has the epic grandeur and poetic sweetness of all simple but necessary things. Necessary to live well, welcomed into our absurd contradictions and our unsuspected tenderness. Call them if you want emotions, they sang: yes, here too we are actually talking about emotions because the “sadness” of the title, the author clarifies, comes from the Latin satis (fullness). Until not long ago, being sad meant being overflowing with the intensity of an experience of any kind.
Rather than compromised joy, true sadness indicates the opposite: an intoxicating fervor that reminds us how fleeting and mysterious life can be. So let’s enjoy even sadness while it lasts. «I was born in the USA and raised in Geneva» says Koenig, born in 1984. «I was a solitary young man immersed in a sea of different cultures mixed together: this was how I saw first-hand how many ways of looking at the world exist and how arbitrary the language is. Yet what do we do? We take it so seriously that we entrust the meaning of our career and our humanity to it. I saw families, including my own, fall apart due to disagreements related to the meaning to be attributed to words, getting tangled up in arguments about what was said, rather than what it felt like. Here: I wrote the book to remind myself that I always have the power to define myself and to express exactly what I feel, even if I have to invent a way. Words are like constellations, artificial patterns in the air. We can connect the dots of the sky in millions of different ways and define ourselves whenever we want” adds Koenig who is also a videomaker and among all the emotions in his book he chooses sonder, that “realization that every random passerby is the main character of the own story, in which you are only a figure in the background.”
Feel a sense of “sonder”
«When I sometimes feel bogged down, I look around and feeling a sense of enormity reassures me. I see an entire alternative universe making its way into my own world and I stop feeling like the main character of this unknown and immense story of existence: when I realize it I feel sonder, my favorite emotion. Emotions are difficult to define because they are intimate, mysterious and multisemantic. But they are as real as something you can hold in your hand » she adds.
Our feelings, in essence, deserve to find words because they are true, important and worth exploring. There is one book that holds a special place in Koenig’s heart and that is Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (in Italy published by Einaudi), where the title refers to a town in the Mid-West told through the stories of some of its inhabitants. «These are people who live alienated and desperately looking for a way to express themselves». The author describes them with a sense of tragic absurdity to give an idea of how there are people who base their lives on random thoughts transformed into truths which then, grotesquely, reveal themselves to be falsehoods. «My dictionary, without this reading, would not exist» he concludes.
Coach of souls and emotions
And speaking of capacious feelings ad infinitum of words, it came out a few years ago The whole truth about love (Sperling & Kupfer), a book written by Franco Bolelli and his wife, Manuela Mantegazza, who to make that truth understandable removed material and added the metamorphoses of the heart: readers are left with the sensation of feeling understood like never before. Bolelli, Milanese philosopher and essayist who taught at the Polytechnic, wrote over thirty books (three of these with his wife) and passed away three years ago. They defined him as a “coach of souls” but also of emotions. He believed in the propulsive force of feelings as well as in the need to reinvent language to give it shape, and anyone who knew him (including Jovanotti) reminds us of this in Long live Francoa new free podcast created by Michele Dalai and his son Daniele Bolelli full of contributions.
Getting in tune with passions and inventing a residence for them is the challenge. There are those who do it with words and those who do it with something else. Japanese Masashi Asada chose a camera. His true story – at the cinema now in Family Photos – begins in his family where everyone has a secret dream. Her father wanted to be a fireman, her older brother a Formula 1 driver and her mother always imagined herself as the wife of a Yakuza gangster. Masashi decides to portray them by recreating all the lives they would have liked to live. Immortalizing other families will make them happy and he will become famous.
Lost family albums
One day, however, faced with the dramatic earthquake of 2011, he wants to do something useful: he joins the volunteers to save the family albums lost in the collapse of the houses and in a few months he will return more than 60 thousand photos to his relatives, an (invaluable) way in which the survivors found memories and emotions. So what’s left but to immortalize everything? Joys, urgencies, oddities, demons, pains: ensuring that those vibrations that form the background of our everyday life do not remain the hum dispersed in the air. All you have to do is try and have fun: perhaps follow the example of Enrico Galiano who of Koenig’s dictionary he wrote the afterword taking advantage of that atmosphere of freedom to invent himself now violence (the silence that makes noise), now dishenough (the epiphanic moment in which we declare out loud, concentrating it, everything that we are no longer willing to tolerate). Every word, here too, is accompanied by explanations that become nice stories of revealed sadness that ultimately talk about us. As the mareviglia, the feeling of wonder that overcomes us when the sea suddenly appears. And maybe it’s 28 degrees but it’s October, and it’s immediately wonderful.
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