Toshno
Marina is trying to describe Raskolnikov’s interior state
and uses the word toshno, which she says comes
from the same word as “to vomit,” which makes me think
of Sartre’s La Nausee and the German Weltschmertz,
but Marina says, it also has an element of nostalgia or longing,
thinking about how at one time you felt happy
but can no longer feel that way, though from my perch
it’s difficult not to see Raskolnikov’s malady
as a combination of poor nutrition and too much philosophy,
or at least that’s how I think of myself in my twenties,
thin from vegetarianism and grinding anxiety, maddened
by my parents’ fundamentalism, shucked off
but lurking in the corners of my brain, though in the ensuing days
I begin to think of other emotions that English has
no word to express: to take something bad, for example,
such as a firing, broken heart, insult, and turn it
into something so luminous that you are grateful
to the ex-wife, nasty co-worker, unfaithful lover
for the sneer, slag, the stab in the back. Or the feeling
of sadness after finishing a book you adore
because the thrill of first reading those glorious words
is gone forever. Or the feeling when you realize
someone hates you, so that a person, who was once nothing
to you, is now the focus of your attention. Walking
down the avenues of St. Petersburg or lying in an Italian bed,
you think about the river you have just seen
or the painting that until now has been a two-inch square in a book,
but that afternoon you saw the wall covered
with a luminous fresco, colors so vivid that the crazy
painter could walk in from the next room covered
with splatters of red and green and you wouldn’t be surprised,
but soon you will be sitting in your garden at home,
watching the wrens make a nest in a paint can hooked to a tree,
and then in thirty or so years, if you’re lucky,
you will be so old your body will be giving up, shoulders bent,
with no taste for food, and what is the word for that,
and will you know it when it’s whispered in your ear?
