Ever since I can remember, I have been afflicted by what I call premature nostalgia. A simple definition of premature nostalgia: Mourning or grieving, or experiencing acutely a deep sense of loss, a profound wistfulness, ether before something happens or while it is happening.
Case in point: I am holding my lover’s hand. Deep-sea-dreaming in her eyes. Kissing her. While one, or two, or three of these things are happening, I am experiencing, in a deeply felt sense, presence and absence simultaneously. I am missing my lover while I am with her—there is a congruent overlay and meshing of timelines. I grieve for what is gone, what has left me, while I possess it, yet perversely relish what I possess while grieving. None of these feelings are mutually exclusive. They are bound together in a quivering, amniotic bundle.
Years ago, when I was younger, I was eating a sandwich—turkey, cheese and mustard—that my grandmother had made for me, when I was traveling from New York to wherever it was I was going. I was in Penn Station, sitting on a bench, and I unwrapped my sandwich from its tin foil (the sandwich was smooshed and bleeding thick gloppy mustard around the edges), and before I took my first bite—just holding the sandwich, feeling its weight and texture, its thing-ness in my hand, staring at it—the sandwich was gone, my grandmother gone, and suddenly a wave of tender sadness coursed through me, and when I took my first bite of the sandwich, it tasted so good, good in a way that made me feel intensely grateful and want to cry. I wasn’t just eating a sandwich, I was eating the memory of a sandwich, its sentimental and edible ghost, which was energetically connected to my grandmother, her care and solicitousness, my grandmother both living and dead in that liminal moment.
I had often wondered what was that sensation that had the power to move me so deeply, and then I discovered the term mono no aware, which I realized was the sibling counterpart to premature nostalgia. Mono no aware is a Japanese term, not so much a creed or concept, as it is a sense-of-life. Here are several definitions:
- Sensitivity to the sadness of impermanence
- A gentle, sorrow-tinged appreciation of transitory beauty
- An emotion of tender affection, in which there is both passion and sympathy … in such moments the sentiment is instinctively felt, for in them joy mingles with a kind of agreeable melancholy.
I was floored when I read that—agreeable melancholy. Not sad in some bad or negative sense—a sadness born of being human, feeling human. Tender and resigned, supple and bittersweet, the twilight room of one’s inner chamber, a soloist in a choir born to sing the blues.
The following are some examples in Japanese literature, which characterize the spirit of mono no aware. The first is a passage from Essays in Idleness, a 15th century work produced by a man named Kenko.
“Are we to look at cherry blossoms only in full bloom, the moon only when it is cloudless? To long for the moon while looking on the rain, to lower the blinds and be aware of the passing of spring—these are even more deeply moving. Branches about to blossom or gardens strewn with faded flowers are worthier of our admiration. In all things it is the beginnings and ends that are interesting.”
Next up a poem from Zen poet, Ryokan:
“Early summer—floating down a clear running river
in a wooden boat,
a lovely girl gently plays with a crimson lotus flower
held in her white hands.
The day becomes more and more brilliant.
Young men play along the shore
and a horse runs by the willows.
Watching, quietly, speaking to no one,
the beautiful girl does not show that her heart is broken.”
And, lastly, a creature and its song, emblematic of mono no aware:
“The song of the hototogisu, the little Japanese cuckoo, is usually heard at dusk. It is considered not only beautiful, but also slightly sad; the other names for the hototogisu are—’bird of the other world’ and ‘bird of disappointed love.'”
John Biscello 