Today I did a day trip to a city well known to me, and was struck by the absence of feelings I used to have. I used to feel this sense of absence combined with hope, like salvation was just a woman or experience away. This longing is what drives people to wander. It was what drove the hippies, who used drugs both to stoke and calm it. It is an itch, the scratching of which only drives it further inside.
The Portuguese have an interesting word, which I have posted on before: Saudade.
Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation in English. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic or deeply melancholic
longing for an absent something or someone that one loves. Moreover, it
often carries a repressed knowledge that the object of longing will
never return.[2] A stronger form of saudade
may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown,
such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing. . . .In Portuguese, “Tenho saudades tuas” (European Portuguese) or “Tenho saudades de você” (Brazilian Portuguese), translates as “I have saudade of you” meaning “I miss you”, but carries a much stronger tone. In fact, one can have saudade of someone whom one is with, but have some feeling of loss towards the past or the future.
Saudade with someone you are with. Ponder that. Do you not coexist with those with whom you have a history in multiple eras? Then, now, and what is to come?
Then I got to thinking of a phrase I first ran into when I was about 17, from Novalis: “Sehnsucht nach dem Tod”, which is also hard to translate, but roughly lust or longing for death, but in at least my understanding meaning with death not extinction, but something else, a point to travel to.
And of course you have to add sadness to all this. And what I saw was that, say, 10 years ago, some part of me was hoping it could live on the surface of life, float happily, that somehow someone or something would rescue me, that just over THAT hill, and then THAT hill there was salvation.
And what I see now is that my path forward is through. It has always been through. I have to look at the mountains of bodies in history, see all the evil, see human life as it IS, and move through it. I am not afraid. There is another side, there is a destination.
There is an end to suffering. It is easy, reading the basics of Buddhism in college or somewhere, to see the Four Noble Truths as facile, simple, easy. But to end suffering is it not perceptually, conceptually necessary to believe it POSSIBLE? Is not the very postulation of a solution a bold step when it is first advanced?
So I looked at this city without romantic illusions, and it felt good.
When there is anything you cannot face in this world, are you not chased by it? Are you not pursued? And can it not always find you?
And I look at the Flower Children of the 1960’s. Did they not pursue an illusion which had no room for Vietnamese Communists hacking children into pieces, or planting bombs on them and remote detonating them like mines? They did not have room for shallow graves with thousands of bodies with bullets in the back of their heads. They did not want to hear about how we might have prevented the horrors in Cambodia, or just what those horrors might have been.
They still don’t.
All of this stems from wanting to live on the surface of life. This is ignoble. It is cowardly. All of us have both good and evil in us, but not all of us admit this.