You visit your hometown again, the place you grew up in. You walk past the house of the girlfriend you knew when you were sixteen. You look up to what used to be her bedroom window. From the outside, everything still looks the same, though somebody else lives there now.
Her parents are dead, she’s married, has two boys, and lives elsewhere. You feel a searing nostalgia for everything that was and no longer is. It’s not so much her you miss, more what you had, who you both were, how things looked then. It’s hard to explain what the feeling is - unless you speak Portuguese, because if you do, there will be no need to struggle.
You will have the ideal word immediately to hand: 'saudade'. The word, which has no direct translation in any other language and describes a bitter-sweet melancholic yearning for something beautiful that is now gone: a love affair, a childhood home, a friendship. It’s a blend of pain at loss and pleasure that something wonderful once graced your life.
Without words, experience is a fog. Moods pass through us unnamed, longings remain vague, and much of what we feel remains unknown to ourselves and the world. Our words are not just a tool to express our thoughts – they are required to help us form them.
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote, "The limits of my language means the limits of my world". He should have known as he was an Austrian limited by the same language I once spoke and which shaped me and my feelings.
My wife suspects me of having Asperger's. I looked it up: "Difficulty with social cues, body language, and nonverbal communication, socially awkward". My emotional life may well have been shaped by the language I grew up with, after which I became a socially awkward accountant, but if it is my childhood and my work that shaped me, then there is no need to suspect me of Asperger's - who would even have heard of that word when I was a boy - although I like the other part of the diagnosis: "Individuals with Asperger's more often than not have above-average intelligence and may excel in areas of focused interest".
Right now my interest is focused on my first cup of tea as I sit here early in the morning on the sunlit verandah with a bit of saudade coming on.
