The ghostly scythe still lurks in the background. For Lorca, duende would only truly manifest itself when there was also an instinctive awareness of the possibility and inevitability of death. The artist could only live fully in the moment when he knew deep in his soul that it could be the last moment. Lorca linked duende with the passion of the Spanish bullring, but he believed that all Spanish art, particularly the performing arts of music and dancing, was inextricably linked with the contemplation, the fear and the glorification of death. Other artists, though, see duende as a quieter, more peaceable manifestation of unrepeatable and often inexplicable artistic brilliance. The Australian musician Nick Cave, for instance, says that it involves ‘an eerie and inexplicable sadness’, and refers to the music of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Neil Young.
‘All love songs must contain duende, for the love song is never truly happy,’ he said at a lecture in Vienna in 1999. ‘Within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering.’[10]
So musicians, singers, dancers and other creative artists may channel duende through their work. And for those who experience a work of art – the ones who watch the dancer or hear the music – duende will manifest itself as a sudden, potentially life-changing moment of insight, an instant in which time seems to have stopped. It is beyond analysis, beyond explanation, beyond criticism – art experienced in the deepest recesses of the soul.
For many people, Wordsworth’s calm prescription still remains the best way to understand the spirit of poetry, the indescribable something that makes it different from prose. The concept of duende, however, considers a similar problem in the context of all artistic expression and approaches it from an infinitely more personal, intense and intimate point of view. However it’s described, if you’ve never experienced duende, you may never take its meaning fully on board. But if you have, then you will understand the word not just with your brain but in the very pit of your stomach.
Hygge
(Danish)
Emotional warmth created by being with good friends and well-loved family
Years ago there was a television advertisement for drinking chocolate. It started outside on a chilly winter’s night. A lone figure, wrapped up against the cold, was walking briskly down the street, his feet beating a regular rhythm on the paving stones. He was on his way home and, as he got closer, and the night got colder, so the sound of his feet began to quicken, until eventually he was running as fast as he could.
He stopped outside a front door that loomed in front of him, cold and unpromising; he turned the handle, pushed it open and walked inside. And everything changed. Sitting around were his family, with happy, welcoming faces, all luxuriating in the glow of a warming log fire. And there, waiting for him, was a steaming mug of hot chocolate. He wrapped both hands around it with a broad and satisfied smile, and the background music swelled.
It was an advertisement for hot chocolate, which you might think is just a sickly sweet drink that rots your teeth and makes you fat. But it could just as well have been an advertisement for hygge.
Hygge (HEU-guh) is a Danish word that helps the Danes get through their long, dark winters. It’s sometimes translated, inadequately, as cosiness or well-being, but it is specifically about the reassuring emotional warmth, comfort and security that come from being with good friends or well-loved family. The glow of a roaring log burner is often a part of it, but dinner around a restaurant table, with the conversation and laughter swinging easily back and forth, could be hygge. So could flickering candlelight, with a glass of wine and a favourite companion, or a favourite seat in a bar or cafe. When the weather doesn’t make you warm, hygge does, wrapping your love and your friendships around you like a fur coat.
But it’s an emotional warmth that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the temperature. Making a snowman with your children – however old they are – is hygge. And it doesn’t even have to be winter – a Danish summer street festival could be a very hygge place to be, with the right company, or a picnic in the open air, or a late-night barbecue. It’s all about comradeship and an awareness of the deep and sustaining happiness and sense of security that it brings.
The concept is central to the Danes’ image of themselves: to be called a hyggelig fyr, or a fellow who is fun to be with, or who inspires a feeling of hygge, is about as high a compliment as you can hope for. And to be the opposite – uhyggeligt – is to be creepy and scary in a Gothic horror movie kind of way, not just a bit grumpy and unsociable. The idea of hygge gets you through the winter, they say, but it’s more than that – it gets you through life.
The traditional English stereotype is all about firm handshakes and a stiff upper lip rather than anything so emotional as hygge. But an Englishman might protest that it’s easy to misinterpret what seems to be a brusque and buttoned-up handshake. Ruffling your child’s hair as he’s about to set off for his first day at school, gripping the hand of your son as he boards a plane for a long journey, or squeezing your daughter’s arm before you walk down the aisle with her – these could all be very hygge moments indeed. We certainly experience it. And now we have a word for it.
Litost
(Czech)
Torment caused by an acute awareness of your own misery and the wider suffering of humanity in general
The Czech Republic sits at the vulnerable, much-fought-over centre of Europe. Through the last century, the history of the region was largely one of invasion, occupation, tyranny and bloodshed. Under the Nazis in 1939, vast swathes of Czech territory were incorporated into Hitler’s ‘Greater Germany’ – part of the price Britain and its allies were prepared to pay for Neville Chamberlain’s tragic boast of ‘peace for our time’. The occupation that followed was bloody and brutal, and so was the liberation. They were followed at the end of the Second World War by a second dismemberment, this time by the Soviet Union, and then forty years of Communist repression, with the brief flowering of the Prague Spring ruthlessly crushed by tanks in 1968.
It’s little wonder, with a history like that, that the Czechs should have come up with a word like litost (LEE-tossed).
It is, according to the Czech writer Milan Kundera, ‘a state of torment caused by the sudden sight of one’s own misery’. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,[11] he notes that the long first syllable sounds ‘like the wail of an abandoned dog’. Love may be a cure for litost, but when the first passionate flush of idealized desire is past, love can also be a source of it. The emotion is, he says mischievously, a torment that is particularly felt by the young, since anyone with any experience of life will know how commonplace and tedious his own self-regarding misery is.
10
Nick Cave,