Once There Was a Way....

"Once there was a way...."

The idea has been expressed everywhere from Heraclitus to the Beatles and Keane.  How did Heraclitus (500 BCE) put it?

τοῦ λόγου δὲ ἐόντος ξυνοῦ ζώουσιν οἱ πολλοί
ὡς ἰδίαν ἔχοντες φρόνησιν
1. p.77. Fr.2

“Although all hold the Word in common, the people
live as if they had a private understanding.”

That's Heraclitus longing for a world that had already disappeared in his day.  It is the same sense remarked in Isaiah: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we've turned each to his own way."  These sentiments express something of a society detached from a common thread, a binding ideal: the feeling of anomie -- of not belonging to or within one's own society due to the absence of common values, ideals that are shared, are agreed upon, and which are people's common grounding together.  But there is something more: the lost personal, individual attachment to another person and lost moments of connection.  Anomie.

From the Beatles, there is not only "Golden Slumbers," linked above, but this from John Lennon:

Whatever happened to
The love that we once knew
Can we really live without each other
When did we loose the touch
That seemed to mean so much
It always made me feel so

Free, as a bird

 And from Keane:

Oh simple thing where have you gone?
I'm getting old and I need something to rely on
So tell me when you're gonna let me in
I'm getting tired and I need somewhere to begin

I came across a fallen tree
I felt the branches of it looking at me
Is this the place we used to love?
Is this the place that I've been dreaming of?

Is it mere nostalgia, as moving as nostalgia may be?  No.  It's deeper; it carries a greater import that speaks to us about our inner lives and identities.  The Romantics called such a thing Sehnsucht, an inconsolable longing, a longing for something or someone beyond ourselves.

C. S. Lewis described Sehnsucht as a longing for something from another world -- or at least a longing for something beyond what this world can satisfy: 

'Ιουλιανπαθω
"O! I desire too much!"

A word similar in meaning is Suadade -- a sense of people, places, moments, deeply loved and tied to our identity, but now gone, missing.  Remembering them isn't mere nostalgia; it's deeper, having, I believe, something to do with our very being -- with our souls.  That is, someone has been so important to us that without that person we are somehow not quite complete, and we remember....  A word said in just the right way, a sound, a look, a song, a smell...and there they are.  Or, rather, there they aren't.  And we feel their absence as we remember.

One more: hiraeth (from Welsh: hir, "long" and aeth, "sorrow, grief").  It connotes a homesickness, a longing for a home or a person that is no more or, as someone put it, "which maybe never was."  It is for something "irretrievably lost"; one Welsh language official said, "It’s a kind of longing for a person, a place or a time that you can’t get back to, a kind of unattainable longing" (Brosschot).

As author, J. L. Carr put it in his remarkable novel A Month in the Country,

     We can ask and ask but we can't have again what once seemed ours forever -- the way things looked, [...] a remembered voice, the touch of a hand, a loved face.  They've gone and you can only wait for the pain to pass. (104)

Hiraeth can also denote a longing for the past.  That is most certainly what Tennyson called his "passion of the past," expressed in his poem "Tears, Idle Tears" from The Princess:

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

Tears from the depth of some divine despair

Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,

In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,

And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,

That brings our friends up from the underworld,

Sad as the last which reddens over one

That sinks with all we love below the verge;

So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns

The earliest pipe of half-awaken'd birds

To dying ears, when unto dying eyes

The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;

So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,

And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd

On lips that are for others; deep as love,

Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;

O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

All the above lyrics -- song or poetry -- carry a sense of hiraeth, Suadade and Sehnsucht.  There are others.

 Vianney's song, Pas La:

 

 En Francais:

Je suis une cruche,
percée de plus,
j’ai la peau craquelée
depuis toi, desséchée
Quand vient la lune
et le vent frais,
par habitude,
j’te cherche sur le canapé

mais t’es pas là, mais t’es où?
mais t’es ou ? (pas là, pas là pas là…)

Part of his (translated) lyrics:

I am a broken jar
totally in holes
My skin is cracking
since you faded away
when the moon shows up
and I feel a cold wind
I am still searching [for] you laying on the sofa

But you're not here, where are you then?
but where are you? (not here, not here, not here)

The past is a struggle: it's loaded with all sorts of things that have carried significant import into our present condition, the way we think now about things (even as opposed to how we used to think about them).  There are things back there we idealize, things we also dismiss as irrelevant...but perhaps shouldn't.  The Germans have a funny word here: Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: "the trouble you go through when trying to come to terms with the past."

What does it all mean? What doesn't it mean?  Here are meanings beyond mere "feelings" -- here are signficances to our beings past and present.  We cannot explain them: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy," says Hamlet.   And yet we come against them (as I wrote elsewhere about time [LINK]).  "Here, there, and everywhere" -- we are reminded....

~~~~~~~~~~~

 Carr, J. L. A Month in the Country. Penguin, 2000.