In the nearly 5 years I’ve been writing this newsletter, I’ve never missed a week.

Or taken a break.

Now, Busy and I are sitting at Laguardia Airport, about to fly to Maine for a half-cation (I’ll be working part of every day and then ‘cationing the rest). Busy will just be vacationing (she finished her novel Busy in Brooklyn months ago.)

All this to say, I hope you understand that the next few newsletters will be shorter than usual, but not without depth of thought.

Because I grew up with a panic disorder that went undiagnosed until I was 25, I am preoccupied with naming the unnameable. The sense that something is wrong without knowing what’s wrong is a specific type of alienation. In addition to not knowing I had panic disorder, I didn’t know the name for my dislocation, the experience of living in the gap between knowing and naming. My formative years were spent in this gap, and it lay the foundation for what would shape my interests and career.

It wasn’t until I was an adult that I can across a term coined by British Psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion that I felt best gave the experience its unique finger print.

NAMELESS DREAD

That term is Nameless dread, and it defines an intense, pre-verbal, and unthinkable state of existential panic that goes un-contained or un-managed by a caregiver. Bion built the concept around infancy: a child's fear needs a caregiver to take it in, make sense of it, and hand it back in a form the child can understand and bear. When that caretaker is unresponsive, erratic or unavailable, the fear stays formless. Left alone with this oppressive shapelessness, a child will often make sense of it anyway, filling the gap with whatever explanation is closest at hand. Typically, it sounds like, “Something is very wrong with me.”

This experience of nameless dread often follows the infant into adulthood.

He first described this in his book Learning From Experience. (The author photo on his book cover fills me with nameless dread.)

THROWNNESS

In Being and Time (1927) Martin Heidegger wanted vocabulary for the parts of existing that precede thought, choice, or self-description. He was trying to give name to a single, irreducible fact: humans do not choose to exist. What, he wondered, might he call the condition of finding yourself already in a situation you never chose: your body, your era, your family, your language? How might we describe not consenting to being born, and “thrown” into a world and a set of circumstances that you never agreed with? He arrived at Thrownness, or Geworfenheit, in German.

MINENESS

To capture the experience of being and world (he did not consider these separate things; being human already means being in a world) Heidegger coined the term Mineness. In Being and Time, he explains that your experience is yours in a way no one can take over. It’s not selfhood exactly, more like being alive in a particular body at a particular moment. Before you ask who I am, there’s the fact that whatever is happening is happening to me specifically from the inside and cannot be handed off. Your pain is yours even when someone else inflicted it; even when someone else has it worse.

In German, Mineness is Jemeinigkeit

ONELINESS

The soulful sounding Oneliness predates modern loneliness by several centuries. The difference is that loneliness is intertwined with the message that something is “wrong” with being alone, whereas oneliness states a fact of a person’s solitude. Before 1800 (ish), English didn't distinguish between being alone and feeling deprived by it; "oneliness" meant, simply, the state of being one; singular, apart. It’s closer to what we now call solitude, without any built-in ache.

"Loneliness" in modern coinage depicts an emotional wound, and it arrived with the rise of industrialization and urbanization, when we were siphoning off from our communities, and families, heading toward cities and jobs, and embracing our loneliest role yet: being “an individual.” I first heard the word oneliness in Historian Fay Bound Alberti’s The Biography of Loneliness. She argues for reviving the older word, since it names something real that the current vocabulary doesn't: the condition of being one, alone with your own experience, that isn't automatically a lack. I will gladly sign the petition.

QUALIA

This one might be my favorite. Qualia is the subjective, felt quality of an experience: the redness of red, the unmediated feel inside a headache, as opposed to any objective description of the experience. While the term predates Lewis, he popularized it in his 1929 book Mind and the World Order, using it for the raw felt content of "the given" before concepts organize it. It's the reason two people can agree on every physical fact about a sunset and still not know whether they're seeing the same burnt umber.

From Blue Hill, Maine, I will remain…

You’re reading How to Live, a weekly examination of the distance between what we experience and how we interpret it.

Most of what shapes a life goes unexamined. This newsletter returns to the moments that made us and stays with them long enough to see what was actually happening.

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