So here it is: the best passage i've read so far in Orhan Pamuk's glorious book. Here he lays out a case for defining the pervasive sense of melancholy hanging around this city, born from the sheer weight of history and the transient nature of civilization's heights.... I love hearing about how different languages conceive of melancholy, or hurt, or pain, or loss. The poetry of a place emerges when you contemplate how it's people define hurt....
“We might call this confused, hazy state melancholy, or perhaps we should call it by its Turkish name, hüzün, which denotes a melancholy that is communal rather than private. Offering no clarity, veiling reality instead, hüzün brings us comfort, softening the view like the condensation on a window when a teakettle has been spouting steam on a winter’s day. Steamed-up windows make me feel hüzün, and I still love getting up and walking over to those windows to trace words on them with my finger. As I shape words and figures on the steamy window, the hüzün inside me dissipates and I can relax; after I have done all my writing and drawing, I can erase it all with the back of my hand and look outside.
But the view itself can bring its own hüzün …”
Orhan Pamuk
Istanbul - Memories and the City
From Another House Cihangir
...reminds me a bit of the Portuguese concept of Saudade... which, according to Wikipedia, "is a Portuguese and Galician word for a feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return. Saudade has been described as a "vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist ... a turning towards the past or towards the future".A stronger form of saudade may be felt towards people and things whose whereabouts are unknown, such as a lost lover, or a family member who has gone missing..."
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