Tesknota

So, after my temporary stressing I am now quite sorted. The rain unfortunately brought a premature end to our Made Fair Markets, but this granted me some extra time to make a row of my ducks. I now have food in the house, a shining bathroom, made up beds (what fun it was to pump up a queen-sized airbed!) ... heck, I even went through the pile of whatever it was accumulating on top of the fridge, which was mostly mail for people who haven’t lived here for years, washed the bench-top canister set, after a close look revealed that this might be desirable, scrubbed out the bins, and filed some of the papers into which I was losing things all over my desk, all with time to sit and chill for a moment before their arrival.

But the purpose of this post is because there is a new word I need to share. I’ve started reading Lost in Translation by Eva Hoffman, which I suggested into our book club list, after it was mentioned in a Tim Keller sermon in connection with Unheimlichkeit (you can read all about that in this post). If you’ve been reading here for a time, you’ll know that I make it something of a duty of mine to go looking for and reporting on the Sehnsucht in things, and I also like a good German compounded sort of word, so I added in Unheimlichkeit. There's a similar word, Saudade, in Portugese. And now I have a Polish version. Here it is:

tesknota—a word that adds to nostalgia the tonalities of sadness and longing. It is a feeling whose shades and degrees I’m destined to know intimately, but at this hovering moment, it comes upon me like a visitation from a whole new geography of emotions, an annunciation of how much an absence can hurt. Or a premonition of absence ...

- Lost in Translation

Eva Hoffman

I think I am going to like this book.