onism

What it means

It is late, and you are on Google Maps with nothing to look up. You drag the little yellow figure onto a road outside Shymkent. A wire fence, a gas station, a white car halfway out of frame, a sky that was photographed in 2019. You turn the view a full circle. You will almost certainly never stand there, or in the next village, or in most of the villages on the map. That is onism: the awareness that a single body gets a single route through the world, and the route is short.

It is less a wish than an accounting. It needs scale to set it off: a globe, an atlas index, a satellite view, a list of the languages spoken in Nigeria. It does not go away with travel. A person with forty countries in their passport can feel it as sharply as a person with none, because the gap is not between home and one place but between one life and every place. It fades when attention narrows to the room you are in.

Where it comes from

John Koenig posted onism to The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows on Tumblr on 7 December 2014, alongside a video, “Onism: The Awareness of How Little of the World You’ll Experience”. The Internet Archive captured the post on 25 December 2014. The book from Simon & Schuster (2021) gives the entry on pages 35 to 39.

Koenig builds the word by subtraction. Monism, in philosophy, is the view that everything can be explained by one reality or substance. Onism, he writes on page 39, is a kind of monism, a life confined to one reality by one body, with something missing: the first letter. He gives the pronunciation as “oh-niz-uhm”. Wiktionary has no entry for the word.

How to use it

Every time I open the flight tracker and see four hundred planes over the Atlantic, the onism hits. Casual; used like the name of a recurring mood.

The novel’s real subject is onism: a lighthouse keeper who reads the shipping forecast and names every port he will not see. Literary; a reviewer’s label for a theme.

What it is not

Fernweh. Fernweh is a pull toward somewhere, and it wants a ticket. It can be satisfied for a while by going. Onism wants nothing that can be bought. It is the arithmetic behind Fernweh: even if you went, the fence outside Shymkent is one road among millions, and the trip would use up a week of a finite number.

Wanderlust. DWDS defines Wanderlust as the desire to go walking. It is an appetite for movement itself: boots, the next hill, a road without a plan. It is cheerful and looks forward. Onism looks at the whole map at once and sees how little of it any one walker covers. A hiker with wanderlust is happy on the trail. The same hiker, looking at a map of every trail in Norway, feels onism.

In the wild

• Photay (Evan Shornstein), Onism, album, 2017. The Bandcamp notes credit the word to John Koenig and describe the record as a meditation on place.