Yugen

Having words for the way you think is essential to the way you think, a theory goes. Take colours, for example. In English, red and pink are traditionally named as different colours, whereas other languages don't necessarily make this distinction, seeing only light red. However, Russian treats light blue (goluboy) as a distinct colour from dark blue (siniy) in a way that English doesn't but that is analogous to our red/pink distinction. The Sapir/Whorf hypothesis would hold that having or lacking these words actually influences your ability to recognize and distinguish the colours themselves.

The book They Have a Word for It takes this as its starting premise. Aiming to write a useful vocabulary book rather than a mere compilation of linguistic oddities, author Howard Rheingold's ambition is to expand the way readers are able to look at the world by giving them the words to talk about it. He perhaps achieves this aim best in his chapter on aesthetics, which leans heavily on Japanese words. There's wabi, the flaw in an object that makes it more beautiful. And sabi, the patina that gives beauty to old objects. And aware, the bittersweet appreciation of transient beauty, such as that of the cherry blossom falling from the branch in autumn.

And then there's yugen, which by its very nature cannot truly be described. Rheingold defines it as "an awareness of the universe that triggers feelings too deep and mysterious for words." It's an extension of aware, he suggests, an ineffable, poignant profoundity of the kind you might feel while sitting meditatively alone on a cliff at sunset, feeling the ephemeral nature of eternity itself.

The Japanese poets evoked yugen in a few words in their haiku. The film Blade Runner captured the feeling in the final words of the dying replicant Roy Batty: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.

I had no word for it then, but I felt yugen many years ago at Charleston Lake late one October, long after the end of vacation season, when the only sound echoing over the still water and the rocks of the Canadian Shield at sunset was that of one faraway barking dog. And today as I flipped through Rheingold's book, I remembered another time I felt yugen.

I was back home on a holiday weekend of my first or second year in university. Having nothing better to do, as we rarely did in Brockville, my friends Barry and Tim, Barry's visiting school friend Josh, and I drove out to Devil's Door Road. We only ever did this because we liked the name. There was nothing out there at all. It was just a pitch-dark country road. We would drive out, admire the road sign, get out of the car for a bit, take a leak at the side of the road, and then drive on. There was sometimes also some horseplay, but that was pretty much the ritual.

So we drove out to Devil's Door Road, got out, and took the usual leak at the side of the road. The only light was moonlight. The only sound was the wind in the trees and the splash of urine streaming into gravel.

Then, someone began whistling. It was Josh, the visitor. The lazy, languorous, casual sound hung all by itself in the still, chilly night air, and the rest of us all felt it at once. We stood there, transfixed, goosefleshed, utterly lost in the eerie beauty and purity of its song. No one said a word. We just listened. It was and is still the most beautiful, magical sound I have ever heard. It was a singular perfect moment.

And then Josh finished, zipped up, and the whistling ended. It took the rest of us a long, silent moment to shrug it off. "Holy shit," someone said after a while. And then we got back in the car and drove on.

That, I think, was yugen. And that Josh was one hell of a good whistler.