By Jane Sonnenschein · March 14, 2026

Some words leave their mark on our souls when we are young.

At the time, we may not really understand them. We simply feel something when we encounter them. Only many years later, looking back, do we gradually realise that what stayed with us wasn’t just a handful of words, but the weight hidden inside them.

I eventually realised that there weren’t actually many words I remembered from my youth. Just a few. Yet somehow, twenty years later, those few words are still with me.

Heimweh. einsam. Einmal ist keinmal. Es muss sein.

I didn’t deliberately memorise them, nor did I feel that I had truly learned them. It was more as though, during some of the most troubled years of my youth, when I had no real outlet for what I was feeling, they had been pressed directly into me.

When I was younger, I always thought of language primarily as a tool. Something we use to express ourselves, to translate, to communicate.

But many years later, I slowly began to understand that sometimes language reaches us before we ever have a chance to use it. A word can touch something deep inside us first.

That place might be loneliness, disappointment, a homesickness we can’t quite explain, or a kind of pain we haven’t even learned how to name.

We may not be able to explain it at the time, but the word strikes something inside us immediately.

Later, I realised that perhaps what had moved me wasn’t simply the meaning of those words, but the atmosphere and feelings they carried.

Most German words had originally seemed rather cold and distant to me. I needed to memorise their Chinese meanings before I could understand what they were saying.

But these few words were different.

They seemed to be more than words. Through them, I could immediately sense a certain atmosphere, see a picture, or recognise a feeling that was difficult to describe but somehow instantly familiar.

It’s much like the Chinese idea of yuanfen¹. What has always fascinated me isn’t simply its definition, but the elusive, almost impossible-to-explain feeling behind it.

And so those words stayed with me.

Like a needle. Like a tiny stone. Like the lightest touch that, somehow, never really faded, even after all those years.

I have always remembered Heimweh.

Of course, the word can be translated as “homesickness” or “longing for home”. But when I first encountered it as a young woman, what I felt wasn’t ordinary homesickness.

It was something deeper, and colder.

At the time, I even felt that it wasn’t really a word at all. It was more like a kind of pain.

Because Heim means home, a place where you belong, while Weh suggests pain or aching.

To me, it wasn’t simply saying, “I want to go home.”

It felt more like the very idea of home had become something painful.

I imagined it as a longing for one’s homeland so deep that it seemed to ache in the bones.

Looking back now, I think that interpretation says quite a lot about the person I was.

What truly affected me wasn’t only the meaning of the word, but the quiet coldness I sensed within it.

There was nothing dramatic or sentimental about it. Yet somehow, it turned the simple feeling of missing home into something that actually hurt.

I was still young then. I didn’t really understand what it meant to drift from place to place, what it meant to belong somewhere, or what it felt like to keep moving forward while part of your heart remained somewhere else.

And yet I understood that word immediately.

Not with my head. My heart understood it first.

Then there was einsam.

Of course, it means “lonely”. But I’ve always felt that it isn’t quite the same as what we ordinarily mean by loneliness in Chinese.

It isn’t the kind of loneliness that cries out to be noticed, nor does it need grand, poetic expressions to make itself felt.

It’s quieter, and a little colder.

It reminds me of a winter evening, just before darkness has completely fallen. The wind is blowing through the streets. There are people around you, but somehow you know that none of them has anything to do with you.

There is a certain chill to it, a feeling of being exposed and alone. The world carries on, while you remain quietly at its edges.

Some words are like that. Before you’ve even begun to analyse them, their atmosphere has already reached you.

When I was young, I was particularly vulnerable to words like these.

Not because my German was especially good, or because I could explain their meanings particularly well.

It was simply because, at that age, I was already in a state where things could affect me very deeply.

Whether it was my final year of high school or my first year at university, those years were full of feelings I didn’t know what to do with.

There were so many things I couldn’t say, so many emotions I couldn’t find the right names for.

And then, just at that moment, a word would appear.

It would somehow capture that vague feeling and hold it still for a moment.

And suddenly I would think: Yes. That’s it. That’s exactly how it feels.

So there really is a name for this.

Over time, I’ve come to believe that the words which touch us most deeply when we’re young don’t necessarily do so because they’re especially profound.

They reach us because they happen to touch the most vulnerable, unguarded place inside us.

I also remember Einmal ist keinmal.

When I first came across this sentence, I couldn’t honestly say that I understood it.

But it stayed with me.

It was as short as a sudden knock, as cold as a verdict.

Something that happens only once is almost as though it never happened at all.

When I was young, I simply felt, instinctively, that the sentence was profound, cold, and somehow true.

It carried an indescribable sadness, as though it had suddenly revealed something about the underlying nature of life.

Only many years later did I slowly begin to understand why I had remembered it for so long.

Because so many things in a person’s life happen only once.

One departure. One encounter. One decision. One moment of falling in love. One loss.

And precisely because they happen only once, we have nothing to compare them with.

We cannot test them. We cannot even know whether our lives would have turned out differently if we had chosen another path.

They happen, and then they are over.

We cannot go back and try again. We cannot run an experiment or compare the results.

And so the very fact that something happened only once can leave us with an almost groundless sense of emptiness.

Did it really happen in any meaningful sense?

How much weight did it carry in the course of our lives?

Or, because it can never be repeated, was it like a passing breeze, unable even to prove that it had ever existed?

When I was young, I probably couldn’t have explained any of this clearly.

But I had already felt the weight of that sentence.

As life went on, I gradually realised that perhaps what had struck me back then was exactly this sadness: the knowledge that life cannot be repeated, and that so much of what happens to us can never truly be compared or tested.

And then there is Es muss sein.

It must be so.

This sentence affected me in much the same way.

Short. Hard. Heavy.

It leaves almost no room for negotiation, and very little space for emotion.

It doesn’t sound like comfort, much less an explanation.

When it appears, it feels like a stone hitting the ground or a hammer coming down.

As though certain things have already reached a point where no amount of hesitation, reluctance, or looking back can change what must happen.

When I was young, I had an almost instinctive fascination with sentences like this.

Thinking about it now, perhaps what attracted me wasn’t only their meaning, but their texture.

Something so brief and so hard, like fate delivering its final judgment.

It doesn’t soften anything. It doesn’t prepare you or try to protect you from the impact.

Instead, it suddenly puts into words something you’ve vaguely known all along but never quite dared to face.

Only many years later did I understand that the words which stay with us aren’t necessarily the ones that explain things.

Sometimes they aren’t trying to explain anything at all.

They simply stand there, very briefly, and yet you know there is something much deeper behind them.

Over the years, I’ve bought different editions of The Unbearable Lightness of Being: Chinese, German, and English.

Strangely enough, it was still the German that left the deepest impression on me.

Not because my German was especially good at the time. Quite the opposite. Back then, there was still so much I didn’t understand.

But certain words and sentences, when written in German, somehow felt heavier and harder, more like a stone falling into my heart.

I read the English version too, but it didn’t give me the same feeling.

Not because the English was bad. It simply didn’t touch me in that particular way.

German did.

And that’s when I gradually began to understand that reading literature has never been just a matter of whether we understand the words.

Sometimes, when a word affects us deeply in our youth, it isn’t because we’ve already grasped its meaning.

It’s because its sound, rhythm, and weight reach us before understanding does, settling somewhere inside us.

Then, as the years pass, our experiences slowly catch up. Little by little, life helps us understand why those words affected us so strongly in the first place.

Perhaps that’s also why certain words can never be replaced.

It isn’t that we never encounter better words later on, or more accurate expressions, or develop a deeper understanding.

It’s simply that the way something touches us when we’re young may happen only once.

Back then, we were sensitive, troubled, lonely, and had nowhere to put our feelings. Yet we were still completely open to the world.

When a word touched a wound, it went straight in.

As we grow older, experience more of life, and become more capable with language, we somehow become less likely to be pierced so deeply by a single word.

That’s why those few words became so special to me.

They stayed not simply because they were beautiful or meaningful, but because they arrived so early, and at exactly the right moment.

They didn’t reach the person I would later become, someone who could analyse, judge, and explain things.

They reached the much younger me, who hadn’t yet learned to protect herself or find a place for her own emotions.

Looking back now, I increasingly feel that the things which truly leave their mark on our souls when we’re young don’t enter through understanding.

They enter through something closer to resonance.

Something strikes you first. Only later do you slowly understand why.

You remember it first. Years later, you realise that what you remembered wasn’t really a word at all.

It was the sense of fate hidden inside it. A feeling of loneliness. A pain that didn’t seem to belong to any particular category. Or some vague sense of what life might hold, something you couldn’t yet put into words.

And so, when I think back on my fascination with language as a young woman, I realise that perhaps it was never simply because the words were beautiful, foreign, or new.

It was because certain words, long before a person has learned to explain herself, can illuminate the part of her inner world that is hardest to name.

At the time, you don’t understand.

But the word has already found its way inside.

Many years later, after taking countless turns and living through so much, you look back and finally recognise it.

So this is what that word touched in me all those years ago.

Some words leave their mark on our souls when we are young.

Only later do we understand that they weren’t simply remembered.

They had stayed alive inside us.

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Notes

¹ Yuánfèn (缘分) — A Chinese cultural concept describing the mysterious connection or circumstances that bring people together, often carrying a sense of fate, chance, and an encounter that somehow feels meant to happen. It can refer to romantic relationships, friendships, or other meaningful connections. Unlike the English word “fate”, yuanfen often suggests something more subtle: an almost intangible bond between people, shaped by circumstances beyond their control. Its emotional meaning is often more important than any precise definition.

This essay is also available in other languages:

Chinese version: 有些词，年轻时曾印进灵魂里

German version: Manche Wörter haben sich in jungen Jahren tief in meine Seele eingeprägt