Nakhes: Perhaps your youngest has just crawled for the first time, or your oldest has cooked a quiche. “If it were not for Liget,” one Ilongot told the anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, “we’d have no life, we’d never work.” But it also excites and motivates, making people plant more seeds than their neighbors, or stay out hunting for longer. It is certainly capable of stirring up pointless arguments and violent outbursts. Among the Ilongot, a tribe of around 3,500 headhunters living in the gloomy jungles of Nueva Vizcaya in the Philippines, Liget is the name given to an angry energy which fuels human and non-humans alike. Anger is sometimes seen as a negative emotion, but for Ilongot, Liget speaks above all of optimism and vitality. It makes tempers fly and drives people to work harder. Liget : It’s the fire in the chili and the rush in the rapids. Among the Inuit, this antsy anticipation, causing them to scan the frozen Arctic tundra for approaching sledges, is called iktsuarpok (pronounced: eet-so- ahr-pohk). We might keep glancing out of the window, or pause mid-sentence, thinking we’ve heard the sound of a car. Iktsuarpok : When visitors are due to arrive, a fidgety feeling sprouts up. He recalled that, exhausted and foot-foundered, he reached the point where the road forks to Peterborough and was suddenly restored: “I felt myself in home’s way.” The writer Iain Sinclair, who retraced Clare’s journey, used the little-known word “homefulness” to describe Clare’s feeling at this point. For three and a half days he walked with broken shoes, sleeping in porches and eating grass from the roadside. Homefulness : In July 1841, the poet John Clare escaped from High Beech asylum in Epping Forest to get home to his beloved Mary Joyce. Today, hiraeth is most commonly associated with émigrés, experienced most sharply on returning home-and knowing the time to leave again will come all too soon. Perhaps it is Wales’ long history of English occupation which has given rise to this combination of a love for home and a sense of its vulnerability. It is rather a yearning feeling, flecked with suspense, as if something is about to be lost and never recovered. But hiraeth is not a feeling of coziness or comfort. Hiraeth : The Welsh word hiraeth (pronounced hir-aeth, with a rolled ‘r’) describes a deeply felt connection with one’s homeland, casting its woods and hills in an almost magical glow. Greng Jai : In Thailand, greng jai (pronounced: kreng jai) is the feeling of being reluctant to accept another’s offer of help because of the bother it would call them.
“First–Chill–then Stupor–then the letting go–.” “This is the Hour of Lead,” wrote Dickinson. Emily Dickinson described it as “a formal feeling.” The heart seems stiff and detached, our emotions wary and ceremonious. People talk of a fear of heights, but in truth anxieties about precipices are often less to do with falling than with the horrifying compulsion to jump. The French have a name for this unnerving impulse: l’appel du vide, “the call of the void.” As Jean-Paul Sartre recognized, l’appel du vide creates the shaky sensation that even our own instincts are not always to be trusted.ĭolce far niente : The pleasure of doing nothing.įormal feeling, a: Sometimes life’s most painful experiences can leave us feeling eerily cold and a little mechanical. As an express train hurtles into view, you itch to fling yourself in front of it. L’appel du vide : Walking along a high cliff path, you are gripped by a terrifying urge to leap. The next day, the family rises very early and ceremonially flings the water into the trees, whereupon ordinary life resumes. To counter it, the Baining fill a bowl with water and leave it overnight to absorb the festering air. This oppressive mist hovers for three days, leaving everyone feeling distracted and apathetic. They believe departing visitors shed a kind of heaviness when they leave, so as to travel lightly. Sometimes everything seems a bit pointless. The indigenous Baining people who live in the mountains of Papua New Guinea are so familiar with this experience that they name it awumbuk. The space which felt so cramped while they were here now seems weirdly large. And if you happen upon an emotion you’ve never even heard of? Well, you might just notice it starts making an appearance in your life too.Īwumbuk : There is an emptiness after visitors depart. Learning new words for feelings can help us sort out our shifting, melting emotional skies and attend to the subtle forms and flavors of our experiences. For Quoidbach and his co-authors, the secret to living an emodiverse life is developing a rich emotional vocabulary.
0 kommentar(er)
