Maybe you even have a touch of basorexia-a sudden desire to kiss someone. Or worry about your ambiguphobia (a horror of being misunderstood that leads to excessive clarification and re-clarification). Maybe you are familiar with Hygge (the Danish word for feeling snug and cosy inside with friends when it’s cold outside). Perhaps you’ve experienced the feeling the French sociologist Roger Caillois called “ilinx”-an elated disorientation caused by random acts of destruction, such as kicking over the office recycling bin. And there are others, too, which are so peculiar we don’t even have a name for them. But many disappear before we’ve had a chance to spot them, like the nostalgic twinge that makes you choose a familiar brand in the supermarket. Some emotions, it’s true, really do wash the world in a single color, like the terror felt as the car skids. Could you say, precisely, what you’re feeling right now? Is your stomach tight and knotted at the thought of the surprise you’re planning tonight? Is there an echo of sadness about that letter you received this morning? Are you feeling smug or resentful, gleeful or suspicious-or all of these at once? Trying to name and categorize our emotions can feel just as impossible. Any topology of the clouds, he was forced to admit, would always be “an arrangement more of convenience than true description.” In his diary, he wrote proudly that he “bottled skies” as carefully as his father had bottled sherries, and set about arranging his observations according to new meteorological categories. He noted how some processed lazily and others seemed purposeful. He sketched their purple wisps and scarlet streaks. The Victorian critic John Ruskin contemplated the clouds every morning.
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