John Koenig’s bestselling Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows offers a glossary of new terms for living in the modern world.
“There is an emotion that lacks a name,” wrote Ian Eldershaw. I know the feeling, Ian. Like the ache of finishing a good book. Or the gnaw of imagining other lives progressing below your aeroplane window. Or the dread that time is quickening.
Hope seems the best English can offer. Or optimism? Naivete? But none hit the mark. Same applies to agathism, the belief that all things tend toward good. It’s close, but imprecise, as is aroha, a Maori term embracing love and compassion. While Liam Runnalls dreamt up ute-hopianism. Meantime, volander is the trance you enter when spying the world sliding below your aircraft, while looseleft is that vacuum you bear on finishing a good book. Then there’s zenosyne: the haunting midlife hunch that time is accelerating., a book striving “to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being”. After lockdown, braving the outside world, we all registered acute kenopsia, literally emptiness-seeing, where unlit offices and ghost schools sparked a special creepiness.
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