Saudade

Today I'm thinking about someone I haven't seen in years, and feel in my bones that I will never see again. He used to say, "when you tie up all of your loose threads in life, there's no reason to be on Earth anymore and death comes for you." I always thought that this was less folksy superstition and more of a good excuse to hold complicated relationships at arm's length, but he seemed to really believe it. We ended things, and then slapped a messy question mark on things, and then came total radio silence. And now, for the last year or so I've had the same— or rather permutations of— the same dream in which we run into each other at some random bar, the people I'm with all bow out and we sit down to tie up all those loose threads. Every 40 days or so my mind travels down this well worn track, trying to self-correct through repetition, and apparently there's something I haven't arrived at yet because it happened again last night. The joke, though, is that I don't believe there's ever such a thing as closure really, and our time together was alternately the happiest and most miserable I've ever experienced; if my dream ever played out in real life we'd probably either fight or have some sort of equally unsatisfying exchange. And yet.

The Portuguese word "saudade" is one of those terms that, like "Schadenfreude" in German, has no direct English equivalent. As an inveterate obsessive I've long been in love with the concept, though I still struggle to the get the exact meaning right. The best definition I can find is:

a feeling of longing for something that one is fond of, which is gone, but might return in a distant future. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return....Saudade is different than nostalgia (the English word, that is). In nostalgia, one has a mixed happy and sad feeling, a memory of happiness but a sadness for its impossible return and sole existence in the past. Saudade is like nostalgia but with the hope that what is being longed for might return, even if that return is unlikely or so distant in the future to be almost of no consequence to the present. One might make a strong analogy with nostalgia as a feeling one has for a loved one who has died and saudade as a feeling one has for a loved one who has disappeared or is simply currently absent. Nostalgia is located in the past and is somewhat conformist while saudade is very present, anguishing, anxious and extends into the future.

One of the things I find so beautiful about saudade is that not only does it perfectly encapsulate this certain kind of wistfulness, by giving it a name it celebrates it as something of value. It doesn't dismiss it as useless wallowing, it acknowledges that some people leave a bigger fingerprint on you than others, and that's just part of our lived experience: That happened, I knew you, we were there.

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