Is it possible to fall in love with a word?
Especially a word that isn’t even in a language you speak?
Especially if that language is German, that oft-angular, occasional chunky language that feels odd when you hear it?
Now, the Germans have some fine words — schadenfreude, for example — the happy feeling you can get from someone else’s misfortune; or zeitgeist, which is loosely defined as the mood of a particular period of time. Fine, fine words indeed, precise and poised.
But my new favourite is himmelszelt, which, to my chagrin, translates officially as the firmament.
It was to my chagrin, because the first time I heard the word, it was translated for me by a German speaker as “the tent of the stars.”
The tent of the stars.
The problem with the clearest of summer nights here is that they often come with a northerly wind, even in summer. The dew is down early and heavy, the wind ruffling the timothy grass in the way that makes you involuntarily shiver with that core-of-body shake I used to hear described, when I was growing up, as “someone walking over your grave.”
That shiver comes even more frequently when you’re away from manmade light, when the last shred of sunset has bled out from the western horizon, when the moon has the night off.
That there could be just one word that turns the whole thing inside out, can change the entire perspective, intrigues me.
The Milky Way poised purple-white and lumpen-edged and wide, surrounded by — and interwoven with — the great and unreadable pattern of stars bright and dim, the latitudinal and longitudinal streaks of the always-working satellites, the draw-by-numbers fingerprints of constellations.
All of it up there working by the laws of time and physics, like some great expanding and interconnected clockwork — it’s not hard for all of that to make you feel small, and sometimes even afraid.
Lie flat on your back and look steadily upwards, and there is literally so much up there, so much incredible inertia and gentle steady motion, that it’s hard not to feel as if it is a great and unsupportable weight, all those suns and worlds feeling as though they must be pressing down on you.
But it can get even worse.
Try it in winter.
Stand alone in an open winter field, late December to mid-January, out very late at night under that vast great bowl with the brightest of stars unblinking and as hard as accusations, and things can cross over to menace. The windless night becomes the northern sky that saps your heat and strength, full with the knowledge that the universe cares so little that crushing you would be nothing more significant than the slight breath of wind it takes to strike a tremble in a spiderweb’s guywire.
I am not alone in feeling the sudden rush of fear that the cosmos’ cold stare can deliver, the need to rush back inside to the security of bright kitchen light and the halo of warmth from the wood stove. Trading the impossibly huge for the comfortingly familiar and small.
That there could be just one word that turns the whole thing inside out, can change the entire perspective, intrigues me.
Instead of that unimaginable weight, bearing down from impossibly far above, I’ll try and picture the tent of the stars, holding everything up. And that’s the way I will think of it from now on.
When I’m out late on the next winter night, the snow watercoloured blue in the scarce light, I’ll do my best to see it all as the inside of a canvas shelter, holding everything in.
“Himmelszelt,” I will whisper.
Quietly. Under my breath. As if it could be a talisman.
“Himmelszelt.”
Oh, and I hope nothing answers.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire publications across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky
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