Recently I was doing an internet search to find some teaching-related material, and this image came up:
(Translation: Berlin, Berlin, we're going to Berlin)
This is part of a Berlin tourism campaign, and it works! I made this image the desktop background of my computer, and every time I see it, I experience Fernweh.
How interesting that a culture alternately praised/panned for being clinical and analytic (weirdly, despite a shimmering history of philosophy and arts) has produced words for some of the most romantic and impalpable ideas. So many of us feel Fernweh, but it's never occurred to most of us that it could be defined in a word. Fernweh is what Mom was feeling when she'd want to just drive around Westchester County pretending she was seeing sights she'd never seen before.
ReplyDeleteRemember how we were talking about this with Jeff and his books of Sri Chinmoy's poetry? He wrote about all these beautiful spiritual concepts that could be neatly described by one useful Hindi word, but in English were turned into these clumsy strings of descriptors like "God's-heart-worship-ecstasy."
Makes you wonder what a weak language English may actually be. Though I have a feeling you've already stopped wondering about that.