Far-sickness: the longing for elsewhere

I'm not homesick, I'm far-sick: a meditation on the longing for elsewhere and the bittersweet nature of staying still.

I was watching out to sea the other day; waves glistening; gulls crying. The sandy edges of the bay were warm and golden, the water high and frothy with surf. The sun meandering its way down to the hazy horizon.

Gazing dolefully at the scene I felt that same familiar sensation as always; of awe awash with sadness, tinged with melancholic beauty. Like I knew– objectively– that the painting before me was beautiful, yet I was unable to connect emotionally to it.

I’ve been searching for a word to describe it, but this is where the English dictionary comes up short. Instead, I turned to other languages, and unearthed the Russian word toska [тоска].

“No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody or something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.” –Vladmir Nabokov

Looking at the sea— seeing that beauty without feeling its serenity— the word felt fitting.

I live in one of the most beautiful parts of England; people pay thousands of pounds for a slice of what I see every day, but still I felt empty and detached, filled not with wonder but longing, layered with guilt at my own ingratitude.

Yet had this been a scene from a beach in Portugal, or the coast of Bulgaria, surely my eyes would’ve been brimming and my heart swimming with joy.

Instead, what I felt was more like saudade— the Portuguese term for a deep kind of longing not just for a place, but for a feeling or thing that is absent.

I was afflicted with the desire for freedom, a deep aching to roam and enrich my soul with novelty once again; with this inevitably comes a dissatisfaction with stationary life.

A version of what I was experiencing is commonly known as wanderlust, a word overused to the point of cliché yet perfectly encapsulating the wish to travel far away and to many different places¹. Perhaps more apt however is the German word fernweh: a longing for distant places, a yearning for travel.²

When I sought to put my feelings onto paper, I didn’t yet know that a word existed already that so perfectly encapsulates them, nor that I would have so much in common with a 19th-Century German romantic author.

The Germans have always valued a love of nature and possessed a longing to travel. The writer Herr Pückler-Muskau stated in one of his many travel books³ that he never suffers homesickness but instead suffers the opposite affliction– far–sickness. I can’t help but agree.

“[Fernweh (far-sickness)] is not just a desire to travel but a deep-seated longing and yearning for distant places, new horizons, and experiences. Naturally [it] feels deeply linked with melancholy and nostalgia. It also shows dissatisfaction with one's current surroundings and a need for escape.” ²

Travel satiates my restless soul. New experiences give me the stimulation I crave, while wild spaces and silence allow my mind to truly rest. Movement removes pointless distractions, helping me to focus only on the immediate and the now.

So without it, who am I?

Somehow the idea that these concepts are visceral feelings for others around the globe, so much so that words were created in their honour, feels validating. I’m not alone in my melancholy; I’m tapping into an undercurrent of feeling that spans across ages, uniting fragments of humanity like a web of mycelium.

So what is my priority? I used to think it was travel– only travel, and finding ways to feed my wandering addiction.

But now I ask myself: is it simply happiness? Finding contentment and joy in the every day? Is one possible without the other when my soul yearns with disquiet, or are travel and happiness analogous?

I don’t have the answers yet, but what I do know is that the ache for elsewhere isn’t a flaw in my character, but a thread in my nature. A kind of internal migration, triggered not by dissatisfaction but by the deeply human desire to feel alive. That maybe stillness and movement don’t need to oppose each other; they can dance together.

I realised then that the key difference between being home or away is my perspective– literally. When I walk at home my eyes are pointed largely at the ground, retracing old familiar paths like crumpled pages of a well-thumbed book. But wandering abroad and my head is lifted to the sky, drinking in the vistas, wonder swelling in my chest. I need to remember to maintain that perspective and shift my eyes up once in a while.

I watch the surf tumble across the shore and I feel something in me soften. The horizon hasn’t changed, but the weight I place upon it has. What I feel now isn’t restlessness, but recognition. A soft knowing that the longing in me has always been part of the human condition. A quiet reminder that the ache in my chest has a name, and I am not alone in feeling it.

To paraphrase the only usable bit of advice I got from my lecturer over a two year degree course:

“It’s not enough to stay swimming around the fishbowl, no matter how beautiful it is; sometimes you’ve got to swim out into the deep, dark ocean, just to see what is there.”

Side note: does anyone else find dictionary definitions with phonetics kind of beautiful to look at?

wanderlust: noun [ U ] /ˈwɒn.də.lʌst/

fernweh: noun [ U ] /ˈfɛrnweː/

toska: noun [ U [tɐˈska]

saudade: noun [U] [s̺ɑwˈð̞a.ð̞ɪ]

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–Lucy

1 WANDERLUST | English meaning - Cambridge Dictionary

2 Fernweh: What it means & when to say it | iTranslate

3 The travel 'ache' you can’t translate - BBC Travel