/late/ - Late Nights

Ubi sunt or Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubi_sunt

The meaning of this Latin phrase essentially describes it: Where are those who came before us?

It is a similar feeling to nostalgia, but it most often revolves around things that one has never experienced. Things such as historical people, families, buildings or institutions; or just a vague sense of an old society and life that one has never experienced.

I think this is a great example (taken from the wiki article):

>A general feeling of ubi sunt radiates from the text of Beowulf. The Anglo-Saxons, at the point in their cultural evolution in which Beowulf was written, experienced an inescapable feeling of doom, symptomatic of ubi sunt yearning. By conquering the Romanized Britons, they were faced with massive stone works and elaborate Celtic designs that seemed to come from a lost era of glory (called the "work of giants" in The Ruin).

It's the feeling that I sometimes get when reading about old kings of the Europe that existed a thousand years ago. Where are they now? It's so weird that, despite living for decades, the things we know of their life and deeds can be compressed into a few minutes' reading in a history textbook. I feel that, because we know so little of them, the mystery creates a sense of ubi sunt. Where are the good Viking leaders riding into battle on stout Icelandic horses? Gone; consigned to history; bones in the ground; an anachronism. Sigh.

Sehnsucht

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht

Sehnsucht is a German word that is not easily translatable into English. It is a sense of longing or yearning, but where one does not really know what the object of one's yearning is. It is an unattainable and unknowable goal, but people feel as if that goal will bring them to a state of utopia and away from their current and possibly dissatisfying life. You just want everything to be better but better is undefined and vague.

You might feel it when you look out of the window and survey the place you live in, your 'home', but feel like you want to swap it for something else, something greater, something just out of reach that you can't describe; but nevertheless something that would feel more like home than any previous place you occupied.

>Mono no aware

>Ubi sunt

>Sehnsucht

Yeah, I know these feels. I grew up near a very historic city that had unfortunately fallen into urban decay. My mother would often take me along whenever she went to go window shopping at the various pawn shops; the only legitimate businesses in the whole damn city for the most part, in-town. The city was a wreck to say the least, dindus were everywhere so naturally crime was out of control, dilapidated buildings that looked like they fall down if it wasn't for the kudzu ivy which would grow all along the the outer walls of the old buildings acting like a natural brace holding the old walls together. Even so you could still catch an eerie glimpse of what city used to be. Like a derelict street car which had just been left under an over pass to rot, or like the bits of glass you could find on the sidewalk from the old gas streetlamps that used light the city. But the pawn shops were really something else, hand made furniture, rare books, Jewry that was literally hundreds of years old. One of the shops had a huge safe in it that could have easily have fit several grown men inside of it, one of the store clerics told me that the safe had never been opened as the combination had long been lost and the owner wouldn't hire a smith to crack it due to the cost of working on the mammoth thing. I doubt that was really true but as a kid I was memorized by what might have been inside of that safe. When ever we were driving though the city I couldn't help but feel sad. It felt like some world had died long before we had ever arrived and that we were just aliens sifting though the bones. Although, It was kind of exciting in a way to. There was this place that no one else my age ever went to or knew anything about. I feel silly thinking about it now but as a kid I really did feel like I was an anthropologist or something.

addendum

After take a quick look though google it looks like a lot of the old buildings have been remodeled or torn down which I suppose is for the best. It looked much nicer than I remember it. I haven't been back in a long time.

tl;dr

when you write long walls of text you tend to forget what you originally trying to write

>>3237

Thank you for this thread Night Owl

>>3250

>Where did they all go?

White flight, as I understand it the city had a host of other problems but that was really the death knell. The same story that has repeated it self countless times across america.

oh, and I'm pretty sure this is the streetcar I was talking about. Not sure why they just left it there though after they went through all the trouble of getting off the ground in one piece and on to that rail car.

sorry if this is starting to sound like a blog

http://8ch.net/homestuck/res/1173.html

Look at the two posts at the very bottom.

The part you wanna read is the big spoilered bit. I've had that shit for a long time, but never bothered to say anything to anyone for fear of sounding like some edgy special snowflake. or a complete lunatic.

this seems like pretty much the only place people will actually get it.

i'm still not happy with that description of it, but it's the best i could do at the time and i don't feel like bothering to try and fix it at the moment. if anyone wants though, i can expand on it. could probably talk about that shit for hours. and if there was ever a reason to want telepathy, it would be to really get the nameless feelings across to people where language fails.

honestly, i read through all the posts here and tried to identify these weird feels with them, but none of them quite do it justice. frequently, i even feel this stuff as a physical thing. some strange thing in my gut that just starts and persists when i really start thinking about the stuff. got it going right now and i know that nothing but some nice wholesome bandit-shooting will help.

i really hope some of you get this too and i don't sound like a lunatic even in the place where people talk about weird feels.

also if any of you NightOwls are into Homestuck, feel free to tell me what you think of the rest

>>3360

Do expand on it then. I think I get it but I'm not really sure.

I used to, and still do to some extent, get these really strong individual feels listening to certain tracks that I'd then end up listening to dozens upon dozens of times. Kind of when it really hits you right but more. It's like being sucked into another world completely. Often it's been a set of tracks and brought up by all the other things I've been doing at the time and what I've been thinking about. But then the music just wraps it together in a way. I haven't really felt it for some time and it greatly bothers me. Kind of like when you listen to something after watching a movie and you feel a void in your chest. Surely people get that?

I don't entirely know what I'm even trying to say. Or is it just how enjoying music is? I'm too confused.