It is a wet, quiet, cold, and somewhat dreary day. My thoughts flex inward like a flock of parakeets with heads tucked under their wings, voices muffled as they speak an instant already gone. Life feels off balance, stuck between a past that can be revisited but never reinhabited and a future that relentlessly moves on.
There is a basket of words to pluck from: homesick, absent, longing, melancholy, nostalgic, wistful. There is a Portuguese word some experts say is untranslatable, saudade. I think it’s pronounced “sow u dade” but I could be wrong.
I’m tempted to take up Valeria Luiselli’s challenge in her wonderful first book, Sidewalks: “why not just steal the word?”
“When we have only a partial knowledge of a language, the imagination fills in the sense of a word, a phrase, or a paragraph—like those drawing books where the pages are covered with dots that, as children, we had to join with a crayon to reveal the complete image. I don’t understand Portuguese, or I understand it as partially as any other Spanish speaker. If I say “saudade,” it will always be joining the dots of a foreign page.”
There are so many dots. Fernando Pessoa’s The Book Of Disbelief is filled with them. His book describes a metaphysical saudade, not memory but existential homesickness.
“I carry within me all the dreams of the world.”
An alternative is Clarice Lispector’s Agua Viva: the book is a continuous interior meditation, a voice speaking to an unnamed “you,” attempting to capture the immediacy of being alive before experience hardens into memory or language. Can we feel saudade for the present itself while we are living it? What does “is” or “the present” mean if they instantaneously turn into “was” or “the past?” We can picture the past and the future but how do we picture “now?”
“Now I know: I’m alone. I and my freedom that I don’t know how to use. Great responsibility of solitude. Whoever isn’t lost doesn’t know freedom and love it. As for me, I own up to my solitude that sometimes falls into ecstasy as before fireworks. I am alone and must live a certain intimate glory that in solitude can become pain. And the pain, silence. I keep its name secret. I need secrets in order to live.” Agua Viva or The Stream of Life
Pessoa in his pasted together book of random musings describes a recurring feeling that life itself is always slightly elsewhere. Lispector struggles to write an instant already gone. Saudade is not just nostalgia but longing without resolution, not just mourning but the presence of absence, not just memory but an awareness of time’s irreversibility, not just exile but something that happens even at home, not just romance but desire that survives fulfillment.
For me, saudade is a rainy day. It takes me back to a young boy shooting hoops inside a large garage in Arbuckle, to a moment of angst over a college exam at Stanford, to the old Sea Gull Cellar bar in Mendocino just opened before the crowd arrived when I listened to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain or after closing at night when I schmoozed with the bartenders and got drunk on Tuaca. Or later when at a financial conference in Boston I sat with my wife by the bar window and watched elegantly dressed men and women exit a cab in the snow while we ate lobster pizza and drank Iron Horse champagne. Or, later still, after I sold my business, and sat in a straight back chair with my hands on a keyboard and typed out these sentences at this very moment. So, what is it, this very moment, an infinitesimal indecipherable space between the future and the past?
Maybe now is akin to the measurement problem in quantum physics, Heidenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Schrodinger’s cat, the wave/particle conundrum that baffled Richard Feynman.
Pessoa suggests that the real world can often be mundane, painful, or overwhelming, and that literature offers a refined and pleasurable refuge from it. By immersing ourselves in stories and ideas, we aren’t just passing time; we are temporarily stepping out of our own reality to experience others. Pessoa lived deeply in his own imagination. Literature wasn’t just a hobby. It was a sophisticated way to manage the burden of existence by choosing a more “agreeable” reality. Pessoa asserts that life is more tragic and fragmented than philosophy allows. It is a series of sharp unresolvable contradictions that logic cannot smooth away.
Perhaps “now” is what remains after you peel everything else away.
“Lispector–like Beckett, or, to a degree, Kafka’s–strips language to the bone, in search of some kind of metaphysical core or nucleus. The way she composes a sentence has more to do with subtracting layers from the world she observes than with adding commentary to it … Lispector is the master of magnifying small, everyday details into epiphanies.” (Valeria Luiselli review of The Complete Stories of Clarice Lispector)
How do we catch the present? It exists but the moment we name it, it becomes the past. Can writing approach experience before it freezes into meaning, like music or a painting? The fog erases outlines as quickly as it reveals them. The tides undo their own traces. The horizon is always present but unreachable. We do not only long for what is past. We long for the present while it is happening.
Saudade is intimately tied to memory. Memory can be tied to an emotional space like what inspired me to start this blog or a memory can be tied to physical artifacts (Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence). Memory is a photograph that keeps on developing after you look at it. Just like “now” it’s hard to pin down. The present slips away even as it’s lived. Ordinary objects can become uncanny carriers of meaning. As much as we try to catalogue, label and preserve, memory, true memory, eludes us.
Saudade has a dark side. It was turned into an ideology of control in Portugal under the forty year dictatorship of Salazar. To some extent there is a reemergence of something similar today in the United States, a nostalgic look back through the MAGA rear view mirror. The fact is we cannot go backward. We are always going forward, like it or not. The arrow of time goes one way. Physicists say that is the result of entropy. Things naturally become more disorganized. Humpty Dumpty cannot be put back together again.
Salazar tried to turn saudade into a stable national feeling; Pessoa exploded it into multiple selves, and Lispector dissolved it into the vanishing present.
Luiselli inherits their sense that reality is always slightly out of reach, but she removes the metaphysical gravity and replaces it with mobility and observation. She transforms saudade from longing for a lost home into the condition of never fully arriving anywhere, geographically, linguistically, or even within one’s own identity.
If that, in fact, is the anatomy of saudade it may not be such a bad thing. If Heraclitus was right that change is inevitable there may be something positive to come from it. I’ll end with a quote from my novel Behind The Locked Door: “The best moments are like a sunrise. When it’s at its very best you want to say, oh, if it would just stay like that forever, but if it did, you’d never know what noon was like, or midnight.”