I Love You, Japan

'Awareness of the transience of all things heightens appreciation of their beauty, and evokes a gentle sadness at their passing'

---

---

That's just perfect! They managed to describe what I feel - every single day of my life.

Why don't we have a word for this?

Comments

[Razalon The Lizardman]

Make up a word for it!

[Passions Star]

Transcendence is about the best I can come up with.

[TheDizzyDan]

Well, English has a similar one, albeit a little less precise, that is borrowed from German: angst. When I use Google to define "angst," I get

a feeling of deep anxiety or dread, typically an unfocused one about the human condition or the state of the world in general.

Granted, it's definitely no perfect synonym; the definition of angst sounds like it's more of an intense feeling than mono no aware, but I can imagine how one who's meditating on that might be described as experiencing angst in English.

[PegaSeraph]

3110649 We should make a word for it indeed

[Gray Compass]

3110667 I see Mono No Aware as a nostalgic world, instead of an overly sad one. It's like comparing melancholy and nostalgia - they may sound similar at first, but have different meanings.

Angst doesn't seem to be a positive feeling for me.

Mono No Aware perfectly describes one of those days at the beach, having fun with your friends - your heart is filled by a warm happiness, and everyone is enjoying the moment - but you know that it will eventually come to an end.

[TheDizzyDan]

3110739
Valid point. I was getting that impression, but I guess I failed to word that properly. One could say angst is an expressly negative word, whereas mono no aware is a poetic phrase much lighter than the former.

From my viewpoint, though, a passing meditation on the transience of things, while it does make the scene you paint bittersweet, it strikes me as dark in the sense that there is that little thought, however gentle, transient, and merely musing. Almost anything existential strikes me as dark, I guess. This might be a case of connotation versus denotation for me, where I feel the word holds meaning beyond its standard definition. The definitions certainly are not parallel.

[I NO LONGER EXIST]

We do have a word for this...well, more like a phrase: "a resignation to ephemerality"

This isn't an exclusively Japanese concept. It's universal. All cultures possess some form of regard for the impermanence of things and the consequent melancholy at the recognition of such.