emmenalgia

Emmenalgia names a longing to persevere into an indefinite future, but its source also gives it a contrary edge: the desire to withdraw from other people’s laws and decisions. In letters exchanged between Luisa Lattes and Marco Carrera in December 2018, the word becomes a lens on Marco’s enduring stillness and the painful distance between them. It does not undo their separation; it makes Luisa reconsider who, after all those years, could not take the step toward the other.

Origin and Meaning

Luisa encounters emmenalgia while reading a book about Fabrizio De André, written by Dori Ghezzi with two linguists. The book derives the term from the Greek verb emméno, glossed as remaining steadfast, persevering, and continuing strenuously. From that root comes a melancholy yearning to continue indefinitely: an attachment to persistence that reaches beyond the limits of ordinary time.

The definition is not simply an affirmation of endurance. Emméno also means withdrawing from laws or decisions made by others. The word therefore holds persistence and refusal together: one can remain fixed, yet also resist being governed by an external decision. Its account of human beings confronting the limits imposed by time makes emmenalgia both a poison and a cure for the wound of a future one longs for but cannot possess. Even when the word offers consolation for such a wound, it cannot remove the deeper wish that the wound had never occurred.

Luisa’s Letter: Stillness and the Hummingbird

Writing to Marco from Paris on December 19, 2018, Luisa says that the word suddenly makes her recognize him. In her reading, he is emmenalgia embodied: no one perseveres with more force, and no one seems better able to elude change and other people’s decisions. Her insight recasts the hummingbird nickname. Marco’s defining quality is not merely the reason for which he was given the nickname; it is the effort he expends to stay where he already is.

The hummingbird’s seventy wingbeats per second become Luisa’s image for that exertion. Marco can, she says, stop himself and the time around him, and sometimes seem to move upward through time to recover what has been lost, as a hummingbird can fly backward. This arrested movement makes closeness to him appealing, but not easy to share. Luisa distinguishes what comes naturally to Marco from what is difficult for others, and observes that people often change even when change promises nothing better. He, she suggests, does not understand that human tendency.

The image then turns against itself. Marco’s power to stand still may be neither a cure nor a refuge; at times, Luisa realizes, it is the wound. The quality that once made him seem capable of preserving what others lose can also make being with him impossible. Emmenalgia thus describes not only his endurance but its cost to a relationship: the very stillness that invites intimacy may prevent two people from entering a shared life.

Belated Recognition and Separation

Luisa revisits her long-standing interpretation of their missed relationship. She had spent her life wondering why Marco failed to do what had seemed his most living desire: take the step that would allow them to be together. When they came close, repeatedly across the years, she believed he had drawn back from what he had just approached. Her new understanding reverses that account. Perhaps she, rather than Marco, had been unable to remain still enough to be with him.

The reversal does not alter the outcome: the two have missed each other, in every sense Luisa can find in that word. It changes where she locates responsibility, and makes the recognition more painful because she wonders whether their failure may have depended on her all along. Yet even a late understanding is better, in her account, than never arriving at it. The letter itself becomes an act of belated recognition, addressed to someone she knows will not answer at that moment.

Luisa closes amid the disruptions of Saturday in Paris: banging outside the window, shouting, ambulance sirens, and the yellow vests breaking things. She notes that these disturbances have become normal, as has doing without Marco. The ordinary closing wish of Merry Christmas stands beside that new normality. Emmenalgia offers no reunion; it gives shape to the persistence of attachment and to the absence that persists with it.

Marco’s Reply and the Word’s Narrative Role

On December 27, 2018, Marco answers from Florence. He acknowledges that Luisa’s reflections on the hummingbird, emmenalgia, and why they were not together cannot simply disappear into silence. But he draws a boundary: answering this letter does not mean he intends to begin writing to her again, and he says he cannot afford to begin a relationship with her again. The word prompts a response without reversing their separation.

Marco also takes up Luisa’s contrast between movement and stillness, noting that she has moved again and considering possible reasons for the move. He observes that a reason behind movement is easy to recognize, whereas a reason behind immobility is harder to see. In his account, their time has increasingly valued change for its own sake, making those who move appear courageous and enlightened and those who remain still seem fearful or dull. He is pleased that Luisa has recognized the courage and energy required to stand still. His reply extends the word’s central tension beyond their personal history: remaining can look like passivity from outside, even when it demands effort.

The later explanatory note identifies the source of the passage Luisa quotes as Him, me, us, published by Einaudi Stile Libero in 2018. Its three voices focus on the memory and absence of Fabrizio De André, and its creation of emmenalgia exemplifies the book’s attention to the possibilities of Italian. Within Marco and Luisa’s exchange, that newly coined term becomes more than a definition: it lets each reconsider persistence, change, and the relationship they did not manage to inhabit, while leaving the separation itself in place.