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ellenkushnerA friend in a locked post writes about different languages' words for love and friend - made me reply thus:
There is a beautiful word in Dutch (which an old flame taught me) that means you feel a love for something so intense that - and this is pretty much what the King James Bible used, too! - your bowels twist within you. From the way he used it, it's less about romantic love than that sudden wrench you get over a beloved child, or a landscape . . . Nevertheless - interesting to know how English limits us (now that our bowels no longer yearn like they used to in 1605)!
(And, yes, I've forgotten the actual word - though I can still see his face and eloquent gestures in the restaurant candlelight . . . Anyone know it?)
There is a beautiful word in Dutch (which an old flame taught me) that means you feel a love for something so intense that - and this is pretty much what the King James Bible used, too! - your bowels twist within you. From the way he used it, it's less about romantic love than that sudden wrench you get over a beloved child, or a landscape . . . Nevertheless - interesting to know how English limits us (now that our bowels no longer yearn like they used to in 1605)!
(And, yes, I've forgotten the actual word - though I can still see his face and eloquent gestures in the restaurant candlelight . . . Anyone know it?)
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Date: 2006-08-19 10:00 pm (UTC)This somehow reminds me of -- and hopefully I'm recalling this correctly -- the phrase in East of Eden about the time before "the thighs of women lost their clench"...
I am all about the bowel-twisting love.
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Date: 2006-08-19 10:00 pm (UTC)