What's the Word?

Why is there no word for the feeling you get when you finish a good book?  Nothing that captures that feeling of accomplishment and loss.  Reading a book is like being in a relationship really, and finishing it can sometimes fell like a breakup.  You meet these characters and places early on and you’re not sure if you’re going to get along.  You experience their lives as if they were real people.  You grow to like, or maybe hate these characters.  You feel like you’ve been to these places; even those that are fictional.  Characters live and die, they commit great feats of kindness or unbelievable acts of evil and everything in between; they generally behave as real flesh and blood people do.  Then it's over.  Shouldn’t you feel “something” when, as you turn the final page of a book, they are simply…gone?

Years and years ago I read the book The Bastard by John Jakes.  It was about the American Revolution and came out right around the time of the Bicentennial.  Not Steinbeck to be sure, but not among the worst wastes of Canadian timber I’ve slogged through.  Somewhere in the middle of the book a man’s wife dies.  Just up and dies at a place where he’ll never know what happened.  I remember thinking through the rest of the book that he’ll eventually find out and heap vengeance upon the man who was responsible for her death.  He never did.  I finished that book realizing the husband would go to his grave not knowing what happened to her.  Unfair!  I didn’t lose any sleep over it but I remember it nearly 40 years later.  That seems somewhat powerful.

But what is the feeling?  Can you feel nostalgia about something that you just lost a minute ago?  Can you mourn for the death of someone who never existed?  Finishing a book, and I’m talking a good book here, a book that really engaged you and swallowed you into its world, that emotes a variety of feelings.  There’s sadness along with fulfillment.  There’s perhaps satisfaction at making it to the end tempered by the loneliness of losing all these new “friends” in a Band-Aid rip finality.  There can be a lot going on.

                There is a specific word for the action of throwing someone out a window.  There really is.  One word that means throwing someone out a window.  It’s defenestration, from the Latin for down or away (de), and window (fenestra).  I can see a couple of cops standing over a body in the street and one says to the other, "Cause of death?" and the reply is "defenestration."  The word was coined in Prague a couple few hundred years ago when it was, apparently, all the rage to toss civil servants with which you were unhappy out of windows.  That’s probably why there are few windows in legislative chambers.  Those Pragainians, Praguenosticators, Praguers?, what a bunch of kooks.  So it’s nice that throwing someone out of a window has its own word, which is probably used worldwide, outside of the Prague City limits, about once every hundred years or so.  But how often does someone, somewhere finish a book?  A lot more often.  We can’t take defenestration because of the Latin root words only makes sense when the local mayor is flung out into the rose bushes.  So we need to build our own.

                The Latin words for finish and book respectively are consumo and libri so the word could very easily be consumolibri.  Okay but that’s a sterile and emotionless creation.  The Latin words to describe the feeling one might experience when finishing a good book are sadness (tristitia), contentment (contenti), satisfaction (plenus), lonely (sola), and happy (felix).  (Felix, really?)  Anyway, cramming those words together gives you tristiacontentiplenussolafelix.  Sounds like the guy at the Vatican who sets up dates for the local cat population.  If I had to say that word I'd probably toss myself out a window.

                What about saying that you know there is a feeling but words can’t describe it.  You could always throw in the French phrase “je ne sais quoi” which I believe literally translates to “shrug.”  Brilliant if you think about it, but kind of like surrendering. 

                Or maybe…over in Hawaii they have something they say that means hello and goodbye.  But it also can mean affection, peace, compassion, and mercy.  Since it’s is already carrying half the Hawaiian dictionary, why not toss a few more words on the pile and have it also mean the feeling of finishing a good book.  So from now on, that feeling you get when you turn the final page of a really good book will be called, “Book ‘em Danno.”