The restrictions earlier this decade certainly put a toll on us and for a long time, I have been struggling to find the right word for this affliction. Perhaps it is “dolor” which roughly translates to pain, sorrow or grief of a continuing nature in Latin — but more so, it felt like an ache, a longing for something more that could not be simply fixed with pharmaceutical means.
Of course, we turn to the Germans first. They tend to be quite precise linguistically and seem to have a word for everything. “Sehnsucht” marries the word “sehnen” (to yearn) and “sucht” (addiction or craving). But again, I think the feeling was a bit more specific than your run-of-the-mill craving.
The Portuguese has a word: “saudade”, which refers to the melancholic longing for something that is absent. It carries with it a sense of loneliness and incompleteness. One definition by a Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo goes as follows: “a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy”.
The English counterpart might be — nostalgia, or homesickness. For the greater part of 2020, I was, technically, at home — so what was this homesickness I was feeling so intensely? What was this urge, this ache to be in a distant and unknown land, a homesickness for somewhere else?
We return to the Germans, who, of course, have a word for this feeling. “Fernweh” roughly translates to “farsickness” (“fern” meaning distance” and “wehe” meaning ache or sickness). We might consider this as the opposite of “heimweh” (homesickness). How perfect! A desire to travel — a desire to make a home out of land you have not stepped foot in. The life of Goethe makes a nice example out of German travel desires: leaving behind the frigidity and orderly rules of the Weimar Republic, and travelling to a more carefree, warmer, sunnier, freer Italy. The suffocating nature of being at home and the burying of different aspects of our identity is explored in the term fernweh.
Even though I began this writing piece with the effects of isolation, I have, in truth, felt this homesickness for somewhere else all my life. It may just be that in isolation, I was forced to sit with this uncomfortable feeling — and not use physical travel as a means to escape it.
The poet Novalis described the philosophical experience, or rather, the experience of philosophising, “philosophy is really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere”. Holba writes “existential homelessness is pervasive in the human condition”, and in similar faith, Ruth Nichols writes that we cause ourselves to suffer by the “conviction that we belong somewhere else: homesickness”.
If it is the human condition that we feel a lack of belonging wherever we go, why did God create us like this? Ever since Adam and Eve left the Garden of Eden, is there anyone that does not feel, in some way or another, that we have been exiled? That we have to search for a sense of belonging in all corners of the world — we find it momentarily in our connections with other people, in our communities, in books, in songs… but the constant is still, fernweh.
We turn to the poets and philosophers, the loneliest creatures of them all — they tell us it is not really a desire to be in a distant land, but a desire to return to ourselves — our authentic self — which we seek. Either this sense of identity is fixed, in which case, we bury parts of ourselves and learn to uncover them through experiences and travel — or we have an evolving identity, in which case, travel helps us to explore and shape it. Travel will not solve fernweh but it is indeed a superb medium by which we can look at ourselves and the world through a different lens.
