Last week I read
a book by Portuguese writer Manuel de Melo. In it he used the word, “saudade”, which
after many google searches I found means “a pleasure you suffer, and ailment
you enjoy.” Saudade is described as “the love that
remains" after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places,
or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now
triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an
emptiness, like someone (e.g., one's children, parents, sibling, grandparents,
friends, pets) or something (e.g., places, things one used to do in childhood,
or other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular
moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence. It brings sad and
happy feelings altogether, sadness for missing and happiness for having
experienced the feeling.
I have been
turning the idea of saudade over in my mind for the last few days. Of how missing a person who is no longer
here can bring a feeling of both sadness and joy. You miss this person, yet somehow feel a
lightness, a bit of joy, recalling times that you shared together. Those times
spent together laughing at a shared joke or an idle conversation. Those times spent together could also be shared
in a companionable silence, as you both sat side by side, reading books which
described far away travels.
These times may
never occur again, and for that, there is a melancholy, a sadness at the
knowing that these times were a once in in a life circumstance. Saudade is therefore
a pleasure you may suffer, and an ailment you enjoy.
