A Wealth of Emotions, and One That’s Special

The music of Ashokan Farewell moved me deeply when I watched Ken Burns’s Civil War years ago. Going sideways from friend’s post of the reservoir that lent it its name, I recently listened to the music with fresh ears. It churned up powerful emotions, undiminished by time. Yearning? Maybe. Regret? A hint of that. Nostalgia? A cousin of that, but richer and more authentic.

Since storytelling is underpinned by emotions, I dug deeper. I found 300+ Emotions and Feelings, a site that offers odd and familiar emotions, defined. I discovered some intriguing ones: 

Dépaysement (French): The disorienting feeling of being an outsider.

Duende (Spanish): The mysterious power we feel when a work of art deeply moves us.

Evighed (Danish): The felt eternity of the present moment.

As well as a couple that felt close:

Aware (Japanese): The bittersweetness of a brief, fading moment of transcendent beauty.

Wabi-sabi (Japanese): A state of acceptance of the imperfections in life and appreciating them as beautiful. Appreciating the flow of life.

The nearest match was this: Mono no aware (Japanese): An empathy toward impermanence of things and both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this state being the reality of life.

Close enough. The definition cued, George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass, which gives me something of the mono no aware feeling, especially since George died. Have I experienced it outside of music? I think so. Dead Poets Society (ignoring the crowd-pleasing standing on the desks in the finale) gives me the feeling. Especially since Robin Williams died.

That led me to think about happy endings. I prefer them as a reader, an audience member, and a writer. I’ve stopped reading work from people I truly admire when they got too bleak. But this mono no aware is neither happy nor bleak. It isn’t quite tragedy (which is much too scarce in popular culture). It leans toward bittersweet.

The feeling is also persistent, surviving repeated experiences in music and stories. As much as I love The Wizard of Oz, I can’t watch it anymore because the joy at the end is just a shadow for me of what it once was. The same is true for the upbeat ending of Star Wars (A New Hope) and a dozen other former favorites. It would be an eccentric but wonderful triumph to write something with such a deep and lasting emotional impact.

Have I ever created the feeling in my work? A short story turned short script of mine, Waverly, came to mind. It was inspired by a scene that struck me deeply as a child. In the Van Johnson version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, the unpaid Piper lures the children away from town, through a crack he creates in the mountain (at about 1hr 7 min). One disabled boy can’t keep up with the others and, when the mountain closes, is left as the only child left in Hamelin. This level of exclusion resonated with me as a child.

Though I doubt I felt mono no aware as a small child, that’s what the memory created for me over time. I think, over the years, it was transformed into a sense of loss of the younger me. The feeling (I hope) is created in Waverly. Is it possible to provide a guide to creating the feeling in prose?

This is my attempt:

• The character must lose something.
• It must be precious. The loss must leave a mark.
• Time must pass, enough so the broken character can be remade.
• The character must understand that the loss brought a gain.
• While still holding onto the melancholy of deep loss, the character must be grateful for the time before the loss, the healing, and the ability to assimilate the truth revealed.

Of course, this pattern needs to be followed sincerely. The story needs to be personal in some way. I can’t imagine conveying this emotion with out feeling it. The prose must be impeccable, creating as few distractions as possible. That kind of writing requires a lot of rewriting, and here’s something surprising. The feeling is as resilient for the writer as it is for readers and audiences.

I’m hoping I’ll become more conscious of mono no aware in life and art. And, though I still have happy endings in my future, I’ll be making more room for this special emotion.