"Ecstasy and injury--who but the Russians would devise a word describing feelings the mind thinks of as incompatible but the heart knows belong together: umilenie [умиление]. It is an old-fashioned word you might find in Russian Bibles and Dostoevsky, describing a state of being in which you have been taken down, brought to your knees, humbled--when kaleidoscopic emotions of tenderness, humility, sadness, and rapture all wash through you." --Terri Jentz, Strange Piece of Paradise (2006) --But according to Language Hat: To respond to the quote: aargh! Why do people feel this need to ascribe complex, untranslatable, nearly incommunicable meanings to foreign words? As the Wiktionary page says, the word means 'tender emotion'; it's not an everyday word, but it's not confined to the Bible and Dostoevsky either. Checking with Ruscorpora (an online Russian corpus) produces dozens of uses in recent literature; this quote from a 2001 novel by Bykov is representative: "The pine woods, pierced by sun, aroused quiet umilenie in the soul of the tired medical assistant."


"I look upon the geological record as a history of the world, imperfectly kept, and written in a changing dialect; of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines..." --Duncan quotes Charles Darwin in a 1955 letter, and goes on to say: "What if poetry were not some realm of personal accomplishment, open field day race for critics to judge, or animal breeding show--but a record of what we are, like the record of what the earth is is left in the rocks, left in the language? Then what do we know of poetry at all compared to this geology? and how silly we must look criticizing ...as if geologists were to criticize rather than read their remains."