Why We Yearn: The Languages of Nostalgia and Home.

Sehnsucht - Susanne_Kraißer

After years of living away I experienced a profound hiraeth for the fog, the flatlands and quiet villages of my hometown. Sometimes, I’d be overcome with a yearning to be around my ancestors and the life they once lived; the places they had once walked in. I was experiencing saudade - a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for something that was absent. However, it is fair to say that this yearning, this longing was largely Sehnsucht because I knew I was misremembering the place and was pairing the memory with an idealised alternative experience.

Okay – so I am not trying to be exclusive or overly clever – but I have resorted to Welsh, Portuguese and German to describe my feelings. These words have similar meanings and go a little further than the English word ‘homesickness’ to capture the extent of the longing.

It surprises me because the Celtic and Teutonic languages of Welsh and German have both been such influences on the English language so why do we not have a similar word for something had has been understood since Plato’s time.

Plato’s Symposium tells a myth, through Aristophanes, that humans were once whole beings with two heads and four arms and legs. Zeus split them in half as punishment, leaving people incomplete. Now, each person longs for their lost other half. This deep yearning for wholeness is an example of Sehnsucht.

Hiraeth doesn’t have a direct translation into English; hiraeth evokes a deep, bittersweet feeling of longing and nostalgia that goes beyond simply missing a place or person. It encompasses a sense of melancholy and wistfulness for a past that can't be recaptured. Perhaps, because it either no longer exists or we no longer exist as we had during those times, i.e., as children, or before the industry or new builds. And this is because our longing is falling foul of Sehnsucht and saudade.

My longing was great around 2019. I had lived in some beautiful places after leaving what was Humberside in my late teens. I had spent the longest time just south of the Derbyshire Dales. I had lived on the edge of Dartmoor, and between Exmoor and the Blackdown hills, and close enough to London to nip into the markets and down Columbia Road flower market on a Sunday afternoon. Yet I wanted to come home.

The yearning was sometimes so great that I would catch my breath. I even questioned if I was dying!

Once again English fails to provide a word for this and nostos which is ancient Greek is the closest because it means returning to one’s birthplace specifically before death. It also means homecoming and less gentle than the German Heimat which is more existential in its motivation, like a final homecoming. Having said this, I wasn’t dying and it was a little more existential so perhaps Heimat is more accurate.

Who knows?! It's easy to get lost researching these feelings, especially without even considering Indian beliefs like Samsara, reincarnation, and how one's place of death may affect the next life.  

Perhaps I’ll leave that one for another day.