That meaning arrived with a whole suitcase of associations. Wollust was about wellbeing, delight, enjoyment, and plain, unadorned pleasure. What an unburdened, generous word Wollust truly is.
I used to think the wool sweater — der Wollpullover — was also a player in this game of words, riding along on that “Woll-”. But that theory, it turns out, was too itchy and too high-maintenance to hold up.
Whether I feel Wollust, or simply feel like something — wohl Lust — depends a good deal on the mood of the day. Is it ready to do something with gusto, or does chilling out take the lead today? I can’t recall, in the last seventy years — no, let’s say fifty-five — ever having no desire at all. No. Not really. Desire, for me, was tied to whatever I was about to do next. Do I feel like getting up? Sure do. Is it a pleasure to get down to my work? You bet. And when a day is shaping up to be especially full of delight, it’ll have delightful things in store as well.
But at some point, someone in a dark chamber deep in the late Middle Ages took offence at desire. Wollust in particular didn’t sit well with the guardians of morality and their narrow view of the world. Wollust was put under the magnifying glass and onto the examining table. First these people identified the term “sensory pleasure” under the microscope of the moralists. Then the focus of Wollust was narrowed down to nothing but the pleasures of the flesh. And that was the end of Wollust’s innocence. The word — and the acts of Wollust — landed on the index.
Poor Wollust. From pleasure to sin in three sentences.
At some point, after the gloomy Middle Ages, desire tore itself loose and struck out on its own. That’s how it slipped, in modern times, back into the everyday vocabulary of pleasures. Feeling like coffee, feeling like an outing, or feeling like sex no longer carry any mortal-sin weight. Desire, as a word, has become downright family-friendly. Whoever reaches for Wollust these days — the word itself — comes across as old-fashioned, even ironic. A dusty relic from the past that has largely lost its punch. And desire has lost its punch too, for that matter.
Desire is mostly delightful and appealing, as long as it doesn’t show up as part of “loss” — Verlust. Then whoever’s affected usually loses all desire in a hurry.
Do I feel Wollust today, about joining the Terry Fox Run?
Did Terry Fox, I wonder, feel like running a marathon’s worth of distance every single day, through all that pain?
I think he did.
