Saudade

There’s a certain enduring beauty about life. In it, that despite the, sporadic for some and periodic for others, exhortations of can’t, won’t, shouldn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t, it goes on. In it that the humungous repository of experiences that threaten to test this endurance ever so often, continue to amass over time, diminishing the individual value of each, and to a great extent even the significance, of each other. Hardening the endurance. Enhancing the beauty.

The greatest virtue of any sentient being lies in its ability to experience emotions. The capacity to feel not because of the natural elements that passively seek to affect, but those that elicit on account of another, far removed from our own bodies. It is then, only consequent that the enduring character of life carves in its fold the beautiful capacity for pain. And ingratiates itself as a virtue for the one willing to harness the even greater capacity to endure that pain. Cementing the endurance. Eternalising the beauty.

It is only rational to deduce that there’s a certain beauty in endurance. In it, that it ceases to hold reverence in the face of continuance. To the extent it finds its own enduring beauty in the enduring beauty of life. Can there be a beauty more appalling?

Relentless in pursuit, newer experiences continue to weather this beauty. Some etching their history like battle scars on the face. But life, endures. True to its beauty. Invariably, there comes a time when the sum total of a life forged with the unrelenting beauty of endurance, amalgamates and condenses into a longing. Not the kind which keeps you up at night. But then, not even the kind which surfaces in a deep peaceful sleep. 

When this longing cuts so deep as to transcend generations, it registers itself as a vicarious romance that is vicariously observed. Faint and dreamy, but poignant and stark enough to hold within itself the quality to realise. As it did in another’s life, smelted in the enduring beauty of another’s passions. It then simply becomes a longing without any desire to manifest. A mirage of an oasis in the middle of a metropolis. Of a lost time that wasn’t lived. A lost love that didn’t subsist. And a lost past that never was.

The Portuguese call it Saudade. I just call it Life.