Hiraeth

Hiraeth. At first glance, it is a simple collection of letters- perhaps an unusual collection, if the word isn’t already in your vocabulary.  Roll it around your palate; what does it sound of? Autumn seas, perhaps, the sorrowful rush and sigh of waves that, no matter how hard they try, cannot return the chalk cliffs to what they once were, land under sea. In this you would not be far wrong. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that expresses such depth of emotion that it is difficult, very difficult, to translate it into a language originally designed to tell the other Neanderthals where the ripe fruit is. Hiraeth, with all its undertones and overtones of desperation, its auditory folds as rich as a tapestry of sound, means yearning, mourning, grief for lost places; for a homeland from which you have been irrevocably banished- an unutterable cry for a place to which you cannot return and which maybe existed only as a kind of bright dream. So did the Hebrews, wandering in the desert, cry out for the Promised Land; so too cried the children of revolution, any revolution, anywhere and any when, as they sought their utopia. In a way it is the cry of the whole human race.