The Vellichor trip down memory lane
Usha Bande
VELLICHOR — the word sounded quite captivating and set me wondering if it could be a portmanteau word. Maybe a combination of the Tamil velli (silver) and the Hindi chor (thief), I thought.
Not quite convinced by my argument, I rushed to my good old friend of four decades – Chamber’s Twentieth Century Dictionary. The word was not there, but the pathetic condition of the dictionary — with its rickety spine and yellowing pages — rasped something inside me and a strange and undefinable sadness engulfed me. Instinctively, I closed the bulky dictionary and turned to Google.
Vellichor, a word coined by John Koenig, was included in his The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Defined as ‘a strange wistfulness you feel in an old bookstore’, it is overwhelmingly ‘infused with the passage of time’— of things sealed in the long past and the impossibility of revisiting; of a brooding nostalgia for our own past evoked by the smell of old books, the brittle pages and the faded print.
However, vellichor is not about sadness, nor is it about the stack section of the library evoking an eerie feeling of desolation. It is a powerful word that can sweep you back in time. It is about a spiritual longing, when scent-memory opens up the portals to an old world with a new view that can best be described as a ‘Proustian moment’, in which you make a sensory journey. When a particular scent magically conjures up a certain experience, time and place, you instinctively return to the past. It is an uncanny time travel triggered by the inscribed words lodged in your memory.
Human regret and his/her innate longing to return to the past have been beautifully explored in Before the Coffee Gets Cold, a charming, time-tripping novel by Japanese writer Toshikazu Kawaguchi. It raises the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? But rectifying life choices is not possible. The catch is that nothing that happens in the past can change the present. Still, there is hope: the past may be out of our reach, but the future is in our hands.
Old books have a unique vibrancy; they are a repository of collective wisdom of humanity. Returning to them is a delight that transcends the act of reading and becomes an experience. The world of old stories, of characters you loved, poems you lived — maybe Wordsworth’s Daffodils or Kalidas’ Shakuntala, Jane Austen’s Emma or Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles — that each book holds within its ageing pages rekindles your interest and you instinctively approach them with respect and wistfulness. An escape with memories!
Saul Bellow rightly opined, ‘Everybody needs memories. They keep the wolf of insignificance from the door.’
