Sold · 15
$123
TERRA · 2023
- En2
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- Sa
Deep Dive
Saudade is the ghost note, melancholic longing for a first time that cannot happen twice.
Saudade
The Portuguese
A WORD ENGLISH NEVER MADE · READ THE CUSTOMS HOUSE
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RARE
RARE · Rare-Liminal
Portuguese. The presence of an absence. Longing for something that may never return, held without bitterness, sometimes for something that never happened at all.
The word
Portuguese and Galician, first written in the thirteenth century and usually traced to the Latin solitas, solitude. Fado exists largely to sing it, and Portuguese keeps a verb for missing someone the way other languages keep a verb for loving them.
The feeling
It arrives as a presence, not a lack. The missing person or place or era sits in the room with you, almost warm. There is pleasure folded into the pain, which is why the Portuguese say saudade is loved as much as suffered. It can attach to things that never happened.
Against its neighbours
Nostalgia travels back to a past that existed and gilds it. Saudade stays where you are and holds the absence itself, tenderly, like an object. Hiraeth is its Welsh cousin, but hiraeth grieves a home; saudade can long for anything, including a future that never came.
In the work
Warmth pointed backward. A figure lit from a direction the frame does not contain. It softens ruin into memory, and the damage stops reading as damage.
1 work composed with Saudade
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