How do you say?

After one week in another language in which my every third thought is "comment dit-on ____"  ["what is the word for ____" (wash, site, novelist, bizarre)] eventually the brain turns over into the mode where I begin to realize that sometimes I don't have the English word for the sentiment I want to express, and I have to go mentally rifling through my French files instead of my English, frustrated that I don't have good enough command of either language to name the thing I want.

For example: the feeling one has when looking at a horizon one knows one is never likely to see again. Or a house or a ruin or a tree. What is it called? This feeling, it's a weird tug. A dislocation. Happiness to be looking, concern over how much to memorize, temporary amnesia of your other life, the real one, back home.

I do not know enough words. 

By Buddhist principles I suppose I ought to cultivate this feeling every day, anywhere, regarding just the regular sky, but anyway, it's a more stinging sensation when traveling. I find myself running a steady internal patter of "when I come back to Montreux, I ____" or "Next time in Geneva, I'll know to ____" or "I'm sure after a few of these train rides I'll develop an immunity to the sight of the lake and eventually won't care at all that it _____" (is perfect) (is a different color every ten minutes) (etc). Except that the truth is, the bit of time I've spent by Lake Geneva might the sum total of Lake Geneva days in my life. And that makes life seem very large, by percentages, compared to six days in April. And so what I do then is I just stare, I just stare and stare at the lake. I am eating lunch, and I have to stop and stare at the lake, because, oops, it won't be there next week. I'm reading a book, and I can't get off the page because I keep having to look up and check on the lake. I'm walking down a street, and I'm craning my head every time there's a crack between two houses, and my heart leaps - leaps! - because there's the lake again, oh and the castle! Again! And since I don't have a word for the feeling, I just name the sight itself: Chillon, Chillon, Chillon. Like it's food and I'm hungry, and I can store it up to keep me running for the next few years.

I asked a friend who speaks Bulgarian if there's a word there for this particular brand of traveling blues. He didn't know one, but thought that if any language has it, it's German, and it would be about 70 letters long. Or maybe there's something in a nomad language like Romani. He said I should invent one. I'm not in the business of inventing words. However. If English were like German and we combined words like legos, here are some options:

neveragainitude

onceandonlyonceness

howdoIgetbackhereitis
happysadnessforthesightofsomethingsoontogo

totallybereftplacelossprematurelyfeltbeforedeparture

Mon coeur casse. My heart is broken. I must leave Switzerland with its funny, charming manmade things in its sweeping, vertical godmade world. This is a good spirit country. Maybe I will come back. Mary & Shelley came twice, first when they eloped, and then two years later when they found Lord Byron and Mary wrote the book. The country hit her deep enough that she put her whole novel there. It's not at all a monstrous country, but I can see why you might want to imagine monsters here. There's just so much earth, more world than us, the depth and breadth in the land itself puts a different perspective on human industry. You see a clockface branding a village nestled between two mountains, and the painstaking attempt at control in the clock seems a bit silly below the craggy peaks. Mary & Shelley kept orbiting back to this part of the world, even when not Switzerland, they tended toward Northern Italy rather than Southern. No air conditioning back then, maybe it was just temperature, but I like to think it was something more about inner temperature, something inside equalizes when the spirit of the landscape matches your own.

That last picture on the left is the view from my hotel room in Montreux. I couldn't quite capture, but you get the top of a mountain beyond that Belle Epoque building. And this is the cheap room. The expensive rooms on the other side of the building look at the lake. Beats my alleyway in Brooklyn. Montreux! Mon coeur casse!