None of my stories, whatever kind they are, is for a typical reader. I’ve always been pulled by the “put-off” type of story, the one that often alienates typical, mainstream adult readers.
Photo by the Author.
“For what are we looking for if not to please? I do not know if the desire to attract others comes from a superabundance of vitality, possessiveness, or the hidden, unspoken need to be reassured.” ― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
Isn’t it interesting that what we understand as honesty in speaking or writing comes less from superabundance of vitality and more often from an unspoken need to be reassured? And of course, we all want to be received well. We believe some people will be interested in what we said, imagined, clarified, thought: that someone will nod, at least once, will understand, even if slightly, and will not put down what ours after the first paragraph.
In this regard, even silence might be staged against the possibility of being heard. Language is relational; it exists because there is “an other”, even if that other is us at a different stage. Perhaps the impulse to speak is not pure expression, but contact, the opposite of isolation.
We choose certain words over others. We reveal something. Why? Because we want to be seen — but safely. We want to attract. We want to be understood without being totally dismantled. We speak because we long for a response, a laughter, a reflective silence. We write because we want the echo.
When we are deeply sad, speech might feel excessive. Words seem too solid, and the modern language proves to be insufficient. We draw, we paint, we compose songs. We have a long history of expressing that complex state of sadness.
Isn’t it interesting that in the modern world this what is expressed globally as tristesse or tristezza or saudade in its rawest form, renders us unattractive and needy?
True, Tristesse could name a person, in which case, the Arthurian knight from the “Tristan and Iseult” legend would be a deeply complex and tragic figure. Rarely, though, someone is just sad all the time in that kind of romantic taking.
When Françoise Sagan titled her novel Bonjour Tristesse, she greeted sadness as if it were a familiar presence. Not an intruder. Not a catastrophe. Something that walks beside a human.
And then there is that untranslatable Portuguese saudade — not simply longing, not exactly nostalgia. Presence of absence, perhaps. A fullness shaped like what is missing. In Portuguese love poetry and in the songs of Amália Rodrigues, the queen of fado, saudade is a second heartbeat.
I find it fascinating that in my mother tongue, in popular phrases, sadness can literally be a “guest” on someone’s face, whereas the same expression in English would simply be translated as “keeping” a long face. Sadness would have a power to “overcome” a person, but could also be “shared”.
While I cannot dig as deep into many roots at the same time, I can talk about some old fragments. Let’s start with something that will put off a standard reader straight away — sins! To begin with the origins…
A sad monk does not know spiritual delight, just as one burning with a strong fever does not know the taste of honey; a sad monk will not stir his mind to contemplation, nor will he raise a pure prayer, for sadness is an obstacle to every good” — wrote Evagrius Ponticus, including sadness in the catalogue of peccata capitalia (capital sins).
The theologians believed that this vice arises in two ways — first of all, when anger subsides, and a person feels that they have suffered some loss, and is also unable to analyse their aspirations and desires. Sadness may also arise “from some incomprehensible dejection of our mind or from doubt.”
Each time, however, in the opinion of the medieval Desert Fathers, an excess of sadness generates laziness, that is,
the sin which “overcomes us with sleep in the heat of the day” or “encourages us to leave the cell.”
Interestingly, in the thought of the thinkers of that era, the explanations of the fifth capital vice — tristitia (sadness) — and the sixth — acedia (laziness) — were often very similar.
It should therefore not be surprising that the catalogue of peccata capitalia (capital sins) known to us, proclaimed at the beginning of the 7th century, does not contain the name sadness. This vice was incorporated into the last of the capital sins, namely into the sin of laziness. This does not change the fact, however, that sadness and laziness throughout the entire history of the Catholic Church were connected by a fairly strong semantic bond. This kinship can also be observed in old Polish lexis I will be referring to.
The observations show that within the lexical-semantic category of SADNESS, various units had differentiated positions. Some were located in the very centre, others appeared on the boundary of such fields as, for example, LAZINESS or ANGER. Eight words: smutek (smętek), ckliwość (cliwość), tęskność, tęsknota, tęskliwość, żal, żałośćand żałoba oscillated around three groups: the so-called “sadness” group; the so-called “laziness” group, containing names of what is understood today as professional burnout; and the so-called “anger” group, that is, a collection of lexemes meaning ‘complaint, grievance.’
The “sadness” group
The lexeme smutek reaches back with its roots to Proto-Slavic. It derives from motiti, motǫ ‘to mix, to stir, to bring about confusion.’
On Old Polish ground, this verb took the lexical form mącić (męcić), while its content underwent expansion. Apart from the primary sense ‘to disturb,’ the word mącić also meant
‘to make turbid, non-transparent, to pollute, to stir up, to shake.’
Around the 14th century, as a result of metaphorical analogy, consisting in associating the disturbance, the muddling of seemingly ordered matter with behaviour that is domineering, even aggressive, on the part of those holding power, new figurative senses of that verb were generated, such as ‘to oppress, torment, trouble, persecute.’
At the same time, prefixed derivatives of mącić, i.e. smącić and smęcić, also acquired metaphorical content. Primarily,
they named the action of setting something in motion, mixing, stirring, whereas secondarily, the action of a subject that is the cause of worry, thus ‘tormenting, saddening’ others.
Based on these prefixed verbs, around the 14th century smętek emerged, giving rise to the word that the nation now recognises as “sadness.”
In Old Polish dictionaries, this lexeme appears in the meaning
‘affliction, dejection, ailment,’
although some recorded examples introduce other contents, such as ‘a violent outburst of despair’, e.g.:
“Bloody drops fell to the ground, and in this he showed his great smętek,”
or the feeling of hopelessness caused by the loss of hope, e.g.:
“Saint Michael showed him (Saint Paul) a flame where there were light and darkness, smętek and weeping and heavy sighing”; “But today is for all people a time of smętek and sorrow.”
The second of the cited senses is semantically close to the content of the offence tristitia ‘sadness, powerlessness, lack of trust in God’s mercy.’
The examples recorded are not entirely clear enough to state with certainty the presence of the meaning ‘to sin by sadness,’ nevertheless other, later fragments give such conviction, e.g.
“As a moth to a garment and a worm to wood, so sadness…”
The cited excerpts refer to the treatises of Evagrius Ponticus, who, writing about sadness, sometimes used the metaphor of a moth or (at other times) a worm destroying a still living plant, e.g. “The worm of the heart is sadness and it devours the mother who gives birth to hope.”
This does not mean, however, that the aforementioned Old Polish fragments denied the presence of the apology of sadness and suffering known to us. The majority of the texts recorded at that time suggest that sadness was also experienced by virtuous people.
At the turn of the 18th century, one still reads:
“The heart of the wise is where sadness is, the heart of fools where there is joy.”
Thus in the Middle Polish period one can observe that the glorification of pain and sadness was still perceptible, and they were by no means considered in categories of sin. The situation changes at the beginning of the 19th century, as evidenced by the dictionary entry in Krasiński’s dictionary:
“Sadness gives an idea opposite to joy and denotes an uncheerful state of the spirit in which sighs involuntarily break from a constricted heart and a person feels more inclined to tears than to a smile.
It may be painted on the face, in the eyes, in the voice, it may even be harmful to health, but it itself is not physical suffering, for the body cannot experience sadness.”
The cited fragment contains no elements suggesting praise of grief and torment; on the contrary, Krasiński in the definition, provides the previously cited excerpts, treating sadness as the name of the sin tristitia. In turn, later dictionaries characterise the examined name in a dichotomous manner; the quotations included introduce, on the one hand, the sin of sadness, on the other, the trait of pious people. It even happens that paradoxically, it becomes the virtue of hope, e.g.
“Most often sadness walks with hope”
In later lexicons, sadness is defined neutrally, without emotional (or religious) marking, as ‘a joyless, dejected state of mind; worry, affliction, vexation.’
The “laziness” group
Extremely interesting seem the units forming the so-called “laziness group.” In old Polish these lexemes meant
‘sadness caused by lack of willingness to perform work, to undertake intellectual effort, also to pray’
(in devotional literature one speaks of ‘spiritual lukewarmness’). In some old texts, however, it is impossible to determine whether the mentioned elements implied the sin of acedia, understood as a kind of burnout, that is, exhaustion of strength, zeal, also talent, or rather served to describe the symptoms of a state — namely chronic fatigue, irritability, permanent sadness, a feeling of lack of meaning and purpose in life (the sin tristitia).
Such a difficult-to-resolve situation is encountered when analysing the meanings of the names that all relate to tenderness (ckliwość, tęskność, tęskliwość, tęsknota, tęsknica). They derive from the Proto-Slavic adjective toskъnъ‘sorrowful, sad, dejected,’ thus etymologically they are connected with the lexical-semantic field of SADNESS. According to Polish etymological dictionaries, one of the oldest lexemes of this group was formed from the adjective, which in turn was created from cnić ‘to long, to feel displeasure.’ Initially this name was associated exclusively with bad physical condition caused by nausea, e.g. “With this inflammation, cliwość and swelling of the belly come upon weakness,” however already in the mid-16th century, most probably as a result of analogy to the newly formed verb cknąć ‘to be in a bad mental state, to rebel inwardly,’ ckliwość began also to mean (besides ‘sentimentality, excessive tenderness’) the sin tristitia, that is, ‘mental suffering, spiritual collapse.’ Traces of such conceptualisation can still be found in some fragments:
“Misery and ckliwość of life cause heaviness, distaste and unwillingness toward everything.”
Later dictionaries give as an old synonym of that word the lexeme that became the archaic name of laziness.
Slightly different contents were carried by the nouns tęskność, tęskliwość and tęsknota. These lexemes were formed on the basis of the verb tęsknićto long.
This situation stabilised at the beginning of the 17th century. All lexemes derived from tęsknić were treated as meaning ‘heaviness, weariness, boredom,’ thus as synonymous with laziness. Some quotations, however, introduce another content — ‘sadness’ (the sin tristitia), constituting the consequence of acedia, e.g.
“It is unfitting for a man to feel tęskność, because tęskność is the result of idle laziness”; “To know how to spend time is the essence of life; inactivity, unpleasant, brings longing.”
Interestingly, in the modern Polish period the units tęskliwość and tęsknica functioned as synonyms of ‘boredom, vexation,’ whereas tęskność and tęsknota were connected with ‘sadness caused by separation,’ as evidenced by the dictionary entry:
“Longing denotes some inexpressible longing in the heart, which can hardly live, feeling the lack of that which it loves and for which it sighs.”
In the “anger” group are placed lexemes derived from the noun žalbъ ‘sadness, regret, suffering, pain,’ most of which arose already in Proto-Slavic. An example of such a unit is žalostь ‘worry, sadness.’ On Polish ground this name (żałość) was characterised by a very broad network of semantic senses oscillating around the old Proto-Slavic meaning. In some uses it implied ‘despair, that is sadness of enormous intensity, often bordering on madness,’ at other times ‘harm,’ also ‘pain, suffering,’ even ‘regret (for sins), contrition.’
In Middle Polish żałość was most often attested as an element of the sacrament of confession (e.g. “Pain or żałość is the torpor of penance”), more rarely meaning ‘sadness’ or ‘grief.’ This state of affairs did not last long — it changed radically from the 19th century onwards, when the word was regarded as a synonym of lamenting, thus an element of the category ANGER. Contents close to the contemporary semantic structure ‘piercing sadness, regret’ are explicitly recorded only later, although much earlier, Jan Kochanowski, one of the prolific writers noted:
“From every corner żałość takes away the man, and his heart seeks its consolation in vain.”
Meanings similar to the formation żałość were contained in the word żal. Although in Old Polish it was recorded less frequently than żałość, one can observe that around the 17th/18th century it named broadly understood sadness, which could take the form of ‘a feeling of dejection,’ ‘remorse, contrition,’ ‘longing,’ ‘compassion,’ also appeared in the form of ‘trouble,’ ‘pain,’ even ‘resentments and grievances,’ which placed żal on the border of the category of the sin ira(anger).
At the beginning of the modern Polish period, however, the meaning ‘longing’ becomes increasingly frequent and dominant.
A slightly different history was borne by the lexemes żałoba and żałobliwość, which in the Old Polish period were attested exclusively in fragments indicating the meaning ‘regret for sins.’ This process occurred parallel to the generalisation of meaning observed at the beginning of the Polish Renaissance. At that time, żałoba and żałobliwośćmoved on the boundary of the two fields SADNESS and ANGER, meaning ‘a feeling of unpleasantness’ and — interestingly — ‘complaint,’ e.g. “Bolesław made a complaint before the senators against his brother”; “What complaint do you bring against this man?” Also in Polish official texts of the 17th/18th centuries, żałoba was used in the meaning ‘written grievance,’ e.g. a “letter of complaint”; “Żałoba or complaint should be clear and precise”; “When someone comes wishing to lay a complaint against another…”
Although in the Middle Polish period the content ‘complaint’ was as stable as the meaning ‘grief after the death of someone close,’ in 19th-century Polish the trace of it disappeared. From that time on, żałoba means mourning after the death of a loved one.
Marisa Willoughby-Holland, Still Waters
And with this understanding, I recommend reading the work of Françoise Sagan, who in his book, alienating the typical mainstream reader, Bonjour tristesse wrote:
A Strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sorrow. The idea of sorrow has always appealed to me but now I am almost ashamed of its complete egoism. I have known boredom, regret, and occasionally remorse, but never sorrow. Today it envelops me like a silken web, enervating and soft, and sets me apart from everybody else…
Above else I was afraid of dullness. ” ― Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse
Perhaps that is why, when we are sad, we tend to become silent. Sadness is at risk of being mistaken for flatness. For lack of wit. For the absence of a vital spark.
Dramatic sorrow in some social circles appears even glamorous. But unspoken sadness? Disengagement? Nothing to contribute? Retreat? Monitoring? Am I becoming tedious? Am I dimming the room?
Marisa Willoughby-Holland, Freya
Sagan’s confession is startling because it reveals the vanity hidden in melancholy (not vanity in the shallow sense, but becoming uninteresting, losing the shimmer that makes others lean in). When we fall silent in sadness, we are not always protecting others from our heaviness. Sometimes we are protecting ourselves from being reduced to it. We do not want to be catalogued as the dull one, the gloomy one, the person whose presence lowers the temperature of conversation.
And yet, what if silence in sadness is not dullness at all, but resistance to the masquerade? A refusal to perform brightness. A refusal to make pain entertaining.
The real tragedy is not that sadness makes us quiet. It is that we live in a world where quietness is so easily confused with little worth.
“The silence depressed me. It wasn’t the silence of silence. It was my own silence.” — The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
