Saudade, A Deep Emotional State

Saudade is to feel that emptiness that the distance from the loved one produces, that flame that burns within us and that will never be extinguished. .. The deep wind that enlivens the memory of our land or the melancholy that comes from knowing that something or someone may don’t come back to us.

Saudade is the presence of absence. The longing for something or someone that we remember fondly but that we know will be difficult to experience again. A deep emotional state that mixes sadness with affection to leave us the bittersweet taste of what will never come, even if we keep hope.

Saudade, the greatness of languages

The advantage of the existence of different languages ​​offers us the possibility of defining in a single word a mixture of sensations and emotions that does not exist in other languages. And that’s what happens with saudade. How many times have we caught ourselves looking at nothing, remembering with sadness but with love a past event? Who has not remembered with great sadness but great love the caresses and kisses of their deceased grandparents?

No word in Spanish is capable of capturing at the same time the feeling that comes from the joyous memory that also hurts. Something that the Portuguese culture has identified, expressing it through the beautiful term saudade. A mysterious word full of meaning that many philologists and linguists have studied to determine its origin without finally agreeing. This is why it is so difficult to come to terms with its meaning.

Saudade, a powerful word

More than something concrete, this word treasures  a collection of emotions and sensations that evoke remotely from the sensations of the present . An essence that Manuel Melo, a Portuguese writer, describes as “ bem that is suffered and badly that is enjoyed ” (good that is suffered and badly that is enjoyed).

On the other hand, from a philosophical perspective,  Ramón Piñero describes this term as a state of mind derived from a feeling of loneliness. So the various forms of loneliness derive in different modes of saudades: that which we appreciate in our circumstances (objective) and that which we live in our intimacy (subjective).

Other explanations relate it to those attempts to return to that basic security through the death instinct, as explained by Dr. Novoa Santos, or with the emotional awakening caused by the place of origin. As we can see, a whole range of meanings that converge in a psychological state.

Beyond nostalgia

Although saudade is identified as nostalgia or melancholy, the fragrance of its essence transcends the walls of this meaning. Feeling it is not only missing, but also transcending that feeling to become  aware of the importance that certain people and moments have had in our lives. Knowing that nothing will be the same as the inner moment and the shared experiences.

As we have said, this term refers to the breaking of the wave on the beach of our consciousness. A churning of the sea in which absence acquires a present flooding our interior. It is then that we evoke those eyes with which we will never reconnect, the skin that we will never touch or the smell of the place where we grew up, the playground of our childhood, while we witness the timid but constant fall of the Sun across the horizon, making Breda. Saudade is the meeting point between the joy of memory and the sadness of absence. 

Romantics understand this very well. Because as the writer and actor Miguel Falabella says, the saudade that hurts the most is the one that comes from the person for whom love has not died. The one that corresponds to the emptiness that comes from knowing that it is impossible to be together again, but at the same time accept it as destiny, remembering how happy we were while a breeze of sadness caresses the back of our necks. A beautiful, but at the same time painful way of loving …

Relieve the bittersweet taste of memory

Saudade hurts but it implies happiness through one of its edges because when we feel it, we transcend what we feel. We go further to remember happiness and feel sadness, knowing that it is impossible to recover the feeling that one day was pleasant for us.

It’s like learning to savor the bittersweet side of memory. The one that integrates its most opposite poles and finds a certain balance that sometimes consoles us …

In short, saudade means feeling life with every pore of our skin and learning to value everything that surrounds us.  Every moment, every detail, every person can awaken us this emotional state that places us between sorrow and happiness.

And you … when do the saudades catch you?