Descriptions of Desiderium
Notes on friendship and longing
I’ve kept a stream-of-consciousness journal on my computer since I was a freshman in college. As of press time, there are almost 60,000 words in the “Daily” word document. Although “Daily” is definitely a misnomer—I’ve gone through periods of many months without opening it, and other periods where I opened it multiple times a day—it serves as an important repository of some thoughts on an important time in my life.
I often will write entries in this document on rides to and from destinations. I’ve got writings from flights to job interviews in St. Louis and Denver, ski trips in Jackson Hole and Zermatt, mountain and beach trips with friends and family in NC. A standout motif of the tens of thousands of words that have accumulated is that I’m often driven to write appreciative notes tinged with sadness immediately after great times with friends. An illustrative example comes from summer 2020 after a trip to my grandparent’s river house (“Kapps Mill”) in North Carolina:
I’ve noticed that many times after a good trip spent with friends I have an afterglow-like feeling of appreciation for the varied and deep friendships that I have and the opportunities to enjoy them in so many different ways. It doesn’t matter if I am going on a climbing trip to the New, or the Lake with Hayden and Kevin, or a farm trip to Saul’s, or a beach trip with the [lads], or Kapps Mill like this weekend—“It’s not where but who you’re with that really matters.”1 Even if it doesn’t really matter where you are, I am lucky enough to have gotten to go to some incredible places with the people I wouldn’t trade the world for. Unfortunately, and maybe this is just human nature but it still upsets me, whenever I get this profound feeling of gratitude it is quickly drowned out by a flood of bittersweet awareness of the transience of these opportunities and the knowledge that making them happen, at least with my current group of core friends, is only going to become more and more challenging as our diaspora grows in both size and magnitude of distance.
This weekend, while sitting on the porch overlooking the river, Kevin remarked to me how happy he was that he made it because, after the last time we all went up to Kapps Mill [the year before], he didn’t think that he’d ever have the chance to come up again. After graduating and moving to Texas, when would he ever have the time to make even a weekend trip up to Kapps Mill?...
The point here is that the character of our lives has permanently shifted away from the previous model where you could count on the opportunity to see friends who otherwise live far away from you during every holiday and school break. During these breaks there was always time to kill. Now, with our precious few days of PTO and the necessity of seeing family within those constraints, it takes that much more effort to maintain these connections with people that I care so much about. The weekends are still there, but a weekend is gone in the blink of an eye. Weekend trips sustain me right now…
This past year has made me realize the importance of being around people that you care about. At this point, I’d like nothing more than, as someone said this weekend, to live on a cul-de-sac full of all of my best friends from Charlottesville and Greensboro. We could live in fucking Kansas and I would be okay with it.
Now that I live in Boulder, and have made a pile of amazing new friends, I would also invite them to live on my cul-de-sac in Kansas (although preferably we could find somewhere in Colorado).
Just to prove that this is not a one-off phenomenon, here is an excerpt from after a New River Gorge climbing trip in 2020:
It was a 5-star trip, but as is so often the case I feel like I’m clinging to the happiness felt this weekend and making myself feel like I am losing something… I was smiling and laughing the entire time. Yet, the feeling of a Sunday night after a successful weekend with friends like this one is that of a funeral: another weekend come and gone. I don’t want to feel like this, but I just love my friends so much and can feel them all slipping away as our diaspora grows.
I wrote another such entry on a flight back from San Juan, Puerto Rico, a trip I took with some friends from high school about a month ago:
I earlier today mused that I didn’t think I would feel the sense of loss and sadness that I often experience at the end of holidays, fun trips, or weekends spent with friends [after this trip]. I should have known better…
I’m actually holding back tears right now thinking back on each of the personalities that I’m so lucky to call friends. They may make me mad sometimes, but damn the ties of friendship I feel with them are so strong that it always makes me feel powerless to contemplate the passage of time and how life changes the ways which you are able to enjoy these relationships.
As I was saying my farewells to everyone, we were all remarking how the next time we’ll see each other won’t be until Thanksgiving or Christmas. Before that, it was only during school breaks. I just know that as we continue to get older, we become more embedded in our new communities, we start getting married, and people’s parents move out of Greensboro that this pattern will continue… On one hand, I’m so glad to have these deep bonds of friendship to where, even still, I feel like I could call these guys at any time if I needed something. On the other hand, I dread the changes that will make these relationships harder to maintain and enjoy. The only thing to really do is to enjoy them the best I can now and to continue to invest the effort in these relationships which has allowed us to sustain them.
The inability to adequately describe this feeling, coupled with its seeming profundity, made me think of a line from Kerouac’s On the Road: “That last thing is what you can’t get… Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and for all.” I am always having this feeling after doing the things that make me most happy in life. Why is my actualization tinged with melancholy?
After stumbling around this concept for years, using words like bittersweet and afterglow, I came across a word that may get me a little closer to understanding this feeling.
Saudade is a Portuguese word that means deep longing for something that one cares for—often something that cannot be had again. A 17th-century Portuguese writer, Manuel de Melo, described saudade as "a pleasure you suffer, an ailment you enjoy." Another author, Aubrey Fitz Gerald Bell, attempted to translate the concept in his 1912 book In Portugal:
The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.
I won’t presume to understand even a sliver of the cultural significance of this concept, but saudade is a beautiful word that captures a bit of my experience.
Sometimes, I think that it is good to experience saudade. If I understand it correctly, a common use of the word saudade is matar saudades—to kill saudades. To kill the feeling, you reunite yourself with the person or place that is the cause of the feeling in the first place. The next time you have a chance to fulfill the longing, satisfy the desire to see someone, take it and matar saudades—but hold onto that feeling. I think you can have saudades about saudade, too. As written by St. Augustine: desiderium sinus cordis. Yearning makes the heart deep.
Good friends of mine might recognize this as a Dave Matthews Band lyric from The Best of What’s Around. Although I don’t listen to much DMB anymore, the answer is yes: I quote this lyric so much that I even quote it in my own private writings.