Anemoia - and a Tour of the Morning Forest.
I woke from a dream with an ache in my heart. Not for some person, moment, or object I’d lost, but for something I’d never really known: the ancient forests of my current home in Northern California. This set me wondering if there was a word for that. Instead of meditating quietly on the subject, I turned to my computer and typed in “Nostalgia for a time I never knew.” As luck would have it, there is a word for this sensation: anemoia. This beautiful word is not just new to me. Wholly made up and propagated by author and neologist John Koenig a little over a decade ago, it’s also new to the world.
Now, if, like me, you’re unfamiliar with what a neologist does, fret not—I looked that up, too. Neologists are in the business of lexicography. Palm, meet face, as this is yet another word whose meaning I needed to track down. By the time I looked up what a lexicographer does (dictionary stuff), the specifics of my dream had faded completely.
Of course, I know I shouldn’t wake up and stare at a computer screen right away. If the modern fitness dork is to be your guide, one should leap from the sheets, immediately guzzle water, eat protein, expose the eyes to sunlight, meditate, do some pushups, and face the oncoming day with triumphant humility and openness. If that all sounds a little horrible or impossible to you, know that I feel your pain.
But also know that I believe when a question pops into your head, it’s good practice to track it down right away. Because, like dreams, good questions tend to slip around and vanish if you don’t give them curious attention.
Having now lost the ghostly images and ephemeral vibrations of an endless old-growth coastal redwood forest, I’ll make lemonade and consider anemoia with a touch more care than Google searches can provide.
An older person tells you a story of their past, and you feel a sense of loss for having never bought a bar of chocolate for a nickel. Or maybe you look at an old magazine and see an ad for an appliance but the kitchen it lives in has more soul, depth, and “vibe” than anything popular design culture has turned out since the 90’s. Moments like these produce a palpable nostalgia, a longing, a resonance, a shimmery heat-haze of desire for the impossible. But why do we do this to ourselves? What compels the mind to burn up the sugar it takes to want the unachievable, the previously enjoyed by others but now unavailable?
I tend to want to deconstruct the things I don’t quite get, but have limited tools to do so. I often reach for evolution, a concept I barely understand, to help me contextualize the conundrum of impulse—mine and everyone else’s. Thinking about what evolutionary imperative might explain why people want the impossible led me to consider my ancestors. My mind drifted over thousands of generations of beings successfully planting their seeds so that the sun might shine on their kind well into the future. This reminded me that I consciously put an end to my line by cauterizing my vas deferens in my thirties (otherwise known as a vasectomy).
I wondered if, knowing something like that would eventually be possible and that future progeny would go through with it, any of my ancestors would feel despondent or disappointed by my choice. What is the word for feeling heartbroken about a potential future you couldn’t possibly predict? Turns out, there isn’t one that sums it up with the poetry and grace of anemoia, but anticipatory anxiety or existential dread pretty well covers it. And there it is, that old familiar, that cup of sorrow from which most of my mornings draw a little dark nourishment - anxiety.
When did man start feeling anxiety or existential dread? Did my ancestors weep in their huts over the futility of the future? When was the first suicide? Does any of this help explain why longing for the past is so powerful? If I linger on the idea of thousands of generations before me - breeding, loving their children, protecting them from harm, nourishing them into adulthood, meeting their grandchildren, then drifting off the field of play – I feel anxiety for the distant past, rather than anemoia.
There are many words that describe this broadly but not specifically; you know them well – melancholia, worry, nervousness, etc. But perhaps there should be a word for it.
An indelicate blend of the Latin word for the past, “praeterita,” with “anxiety,” gives us “praeterangst” or “praeteranxia.” While I don’t have much hope of either catching on, and frankly, they both annoy me a little, I am grateful to my ancestors for keeping ahead of the falling ax for long enough to make more copies of us. So, I send apologies backward in time for literally and metaphorically snipping the vine on purpose.
Perhaps that’s what we’re doing in our dreams: conversing with the dead while we sleep. Waking up with tangled cognition - a blend of ancestral understanding for the time when they lived, their longing for the future, and our own anxieties about how we’re handling the gift of the present, a touch of confusion is a small price to pay. We slap words on the sensations that follow us into the day ahead and hope that by defining them, we can wrangle them into patterns we can manage. For some of us, that produces anemoia. For others, praeteranxia. In either case, existence marches along with or without us.
As I write, feeling gratitude for my ancestors, crazily looking up various Latin and English words, and wishing I could stand in an unsullied ancient forest, a pang of mild but persistent guilt for not wanting to hold the line of my kind underscores the whole endeavor. Maybe the fitness dorks are right; looking at a computer screen first thing in the morning is bad for business. If only the many thousands of generations before could see me now, caffeinating myself into a worried state, wishing I could see the world through their eyes.
With that, I’ll sign off to drink water and think about pushups.