Larry M. Coleman

I just found out about this word thanks to The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing by Adam Moss. It’s in his conversation with Roz Chast, who defines torschlusspanik as “door-shutting panic.” German has always had a way of saying a whole paragraph in a single word… although that word often is almost as long as a paragraph.

It isn’t explained any further than that, and with no further context than that it is from a book about the process of creation, I thought I knew what it was. I’ve felt that same sort of “door-shutting panic” when writing. Getting to the end of a novel is a sad time: I’ve got to leave the characters I’ve grown to like so much and close the door on them. In writing and revising Ride On, one of my biggest problems was that I thought the ending went on too long. It could, in theory, have ended at Chapter 62. Instead, it goes on for over 65 more pages and ends at Chapter 68—and even the final chapter is one of the longest in the book.

I went over it time after time and finally came to the conclusion that the ending is as long as it needs to be because over the course of the 500+ pages that lead up to it, a lot of questions were raised that were never answered: What’s so secret about Karl’s past? Who is that Al guy? What’s Richard going to do now? What did Karl steal from Richard and why? And what the heck happened to Eileen? In the end, the ending wasn’t a case of torschlusspanik, it was simply what happens when a complex book gets shut.

Because I am fanatical about getting facts straight, I looked the word up and was glad I did because torschlusspanik doesn’t mean what I thought it did. Instead, it refers to the feeling that one is reaching the age where things are not just passing one by, they’re never going to come back. When we’re young, every door is open, and as the years go by, they close one by one. Feeling a sense of fear and anxiety about that is the real sense of the word, and it’s probably the cause of many mid-life crises.

Many languages have words for emotions that we’ve all felt but aren’t expressed in one English word. German is rife with words that have made their way into English untranslated: zeitgeist, schadenfreude, and wanderlust are so common that they’re not even flagged by spell checkers. Weltschmerz is a word that does get a red squiggle, although I’ve come across it several times even though I don’t read German. It’s such a useful word because it describes a feeling we’ve all felt (or at least I hope we’ve felt at some point): the sadness at the beauty of the world which we will never match.

Verschlimmbesserung, like torschlusspanik, is one I’d never heard of before. It’s “to make something worse while trying to make it better,” which is what I was afraid I was doing with the ending of Ride On. It’s an ungainly word, but imbued with German craftsmanship because it’s a smash-up of the words for “worsen” and “better” and the same time.

So today get inspired by searching for words for emotions that are not in English. If you use Google, here’s a link for that exact search. If you prefer another search engine, that’s fine too. If you use ChatGPT, why are you even here?

I’m sure you’ll come across one that makes you want to write. Or, if you don’t want to search right now or you’re one of those writers who (intelligently) avoids searching during creating time because you don’t want to get sucked down a rabbit hole, use this one and get to writing:

Hiraeth (Welsh): A homesickness for a home that no longer exists or never was.

Have fun!